


What Happened

by eluna



Series: When We Were Young [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Catatonia, Codependent Winchesters (Supernatural), Consent Issues, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Emotionally Hurt John Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Emotionally Repressed Dean Winchester, Emotionally Repressed John Winchester, Emotionally Repressed Sam Winchester, M/M, Mental Instability, Minor Dean Winchester/Original Female Character(s), Minor Dean Winchester/Original Male Character(s), POV Multiple, Poverty, Pre-Season/Series 01, Protective Dean Winchester, Requited Unrequited Love, Resolved Unresolved Emotional Tension, Sam Winchester Has Mental Health Issues, Sharing a Bed, Teen Winchesters (Supernatural), Unhealthy Relationships, Unreliable Narrator, Weecest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-03 02:47:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 42,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16317668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: Sammy emerges from where he’d buried his face in Dean’s chest, snotty and shuddering and red from his eyes to his flushed cheeks. “I don’t understand. I’m pa-pathetic. I’m not—I’m not clean, Dean, I don’t get it, why don’t you—?”“Hey. You’re my bitchy kid brother, and there’s nothing wrong with you.” Sam scoffs, turning his face away. “No, I mean—there ain’t nothin’ you’re going through that makes you worth any less than—than everything.”Sam scrubs at his face with the crook of his elbow, but as far as Dean can tell, he only succeeds in smearing the wetness around his cheeks. “That’s not fair. You can’t just say stuff like this and expect me not to…”He wishes he could tell Sam that the kid isn’t the only one who feels these things that aren’t—allowed, if only so Sammy would feel less alone in it, but if Sam knew—Sam can’t know. He already suspects too much. “We’ve already established that nothing’s gonna scare me away. It’s okay to want things, Sammy. We just… I just can’t.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry it took me a million years to get this done. Life's been rough.
> 
> The Clear Lake part of this story is the story I had originally set out to write when I first started writing this series. What morphed into Have You Seen Me Lately was supposed to be a short scene tacked on to the beginning as the incentive for John to move them to Clear Lake to settle down. I still haven't decided what to do about sequels--I have ideas for more (a lot more), but I don't know if I have the motivation. We'll see, I guess!
> 
> Big thanks to **publia** for spending hours listening to me read to her and talking me through pretty much every plot point that you see here. Disclaimer that I've never been to Sioux Falls, just did a lot of Google Maps research; I also had to use Google to brush up on my fuzzy memory of Clear Lake in the 1990s, but I did spend good chunks out of my childhood visiting there and so had more of a grounding for writing that part of the story.

_I treated you bad_

_you bruised my face_

_couldn't love you more_

_you've got a beautiful taste_

_—_ Bush, "Glycerine"

 

_South Dakota, February 1997_

John's boys don't look right when Bobby goes to fetch them from the bus station. If Sam is too skinny, then _Dean_  looks emaciated, hunched over with an arm slung over Sam as they exit the bus together. Bobby doesn't like how close they're standing while they scan the crowd for him before he can catch their eyes, the violent way Sam flinches when Bobby first claps a hand on his shoulder blade to pull him into a hug.

"You're all right now, boys," he says bracingly, thumping a hand against Dean's back. "Let's get you fed."

There's not much besides booze and condiments back at the house, so he takes them to Biggerson's in the beat-up old Chrysler that he'd taken from the salvage lot to pick them up. Sam stops talking altogether once the food comes out in favor of scarfing it down, but the way Dean can't seem to decide whether to inhale his burger and fries whole or to pick birdlike at them, switching off every couple minutes between the two behaviors, alarms Bobby even more.

"So are you two gonna tell me how long your daddy left you in Nevada?"

Sam chokes on his patty melt. Pounding his brother's back, Dean shoots Bobby a hard glare as though the simple act of asking has offended him. "He had a hunt."

"There's always going to be another hunt, Dean. You know how this life goes. What that doesn't tell me is how bad things got when he left you."

"He didn't leave us. He was always gonna come back. We would have been _fine_  if the card hadn't maxed."

"And how long ago was that?"

When Dean doesn't answer, Sam sets down his sandwich for the moment and says, "We’ve been on our own a month and a half? But we were okay till the card ran out a month ago."

His voice sounds wobbly and low-pitched, although that may just be because he seems so much older than he was two springs ago the last time Bobby saw him. Sam would've been, what, eleven that year? He's shot up a few inches since then, his hair a little longer, the line of his jaw that much more pronounced. Dean looks even more different, though to be fair, it's been even longer since Bobby's seen the elder boy—well over two full years. John has a tendency of dropping them in Sioux Falls for months at a time while he's chasing one hunt after the next, only to dump them in motels and do the exact same thing after a few short weeks with them. He's been leaving them alone more and more, and so Bobby's seen them less and less, ever since Dean was around thirteen, maybe fourteen.

"But everything's okay now," Dean hastens to add, and Bobby realizes he's been staring rather grumpily in the direction of Sam's face. "Sam's looking forward to going back to his old middle school, right, Sammy?"

"Sure he is," says Bobby rather skeptically, and Dean starts chewing on his lip. "Oh—so turns out I ain't able to call and enroll you yet since it’s Sunday, but tomorrow, I'll get you both set up for school. How you boys feel about doin' a little work with me the next couple days in the salvage yard?"

He's expecting Dean to light up, but he just casts a nervous look at his brother, who's started stuffing himself with the patty melt again. Blushing faintly, Sam chews through the mouthful he's working on and then says in barely more than a whisper, "Um, can we maybe just rest for today? We didn't get much sleep on the bus."

Bobby raises his eyebrows, but nods, and Sam shrugs one shoulder and starts tearing into his fries.

When they get back to the house, he offers Dean the couch, thinking he'll want the relative privacy of sleeping alone now that he's older, but Dean just fidgets and says he doesn't mind sharing with Sammy in the guestroom like usual. Hushed voices and creaking spill from the room for a while even after Bobby gets the bed set up with (sort of) fresh linens, and he waits until the talking tapers off to sit down by the landlines and dial John's number.

John doesn't answer, which is just _typical_ , so Bobby tries again, and again ten minutes later, and then a fourth time after a few calls come in from a couple other hunters and one West Virginian sheriff looking to verify the identity of one of Bobby's "FBI" charges. He gets an answer on the third ring, John's voice low and irritable. "This better be damn important, Bob, I'm dealing with a _pack_  of ghouls here that—"

"It's about your sons, asshole. Do you just not _care_  that they ran out of food, or have you started categorically deleting all of Dean's voicemails whenever you're not with them?"

That stops John short, if only for a moment. "They ran out of food?" he asks, but his voice is clipped and thin.

"Damn near it, far as I can tell. They look god-awful— _famished_. Way I understand it, Dean used up the last of their cash buying them the bus tickets to get 'em here."

"The _last_  of—they can't have gone through all that on food alone. Even without a credit card—"

"That's right, idjit: they had to blow most of it on a motel when there wasn't enough to cover rent on the crackerjack piece of shit house you had them living in."

John hisses, "They could have stayed in that house _weeks_  longer—months, even—without getting evicted. Just because—"

"Because their deadbeat of a daddy couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone and _tell_  them that himself, or better yet, get his sorry ass back to his boys without making them resort to illegal measures just to find food and shelter! Dean's been to jail for stealing once already, Johnny! Do you really want to see that number go up?"

"It's already going to go up by merit of what we do. Grave desecration, B-and-E's—it comes with the job, they know this."

"That is no friggin' excuse for _child neglect_ , and—"

"Get them in school. I'll come pick them up once I gank these bastards," John snarls, and then there's a click followed by a dial tone.

Mindful of the boys sleeping upstairs, Bobby curses under his breath and plunks the phone back into its cradle. Scribbling a note to the boys for when they wake up, he regretfully pours most of the whiskey (though not the beer) down the sink and then heads out to pick them up some proper groceries.

The boys both nap until well into the afternoon, and consequentially are huddled together wide-awake in the living room by the time Bobby calls it a night at a quarter past one A.M., so he lets them sleep late Monday morning while he mans the phones and calls up Sioux Falls School District to get Dean and Sam both set up for Tuesday. In retrospect, Bobby shouldn’t have been surprised that it doesn’t go smoothly.

He breaks the news to them after breakfast, while Sam’s cleaning up dishes and Dean’s just come back from the bathroom, ashen-faced. “We’re gonna have to forge some paperwork before we can get either of you started in school this week. Not a big deal,” he assures them when Dean starts to protest and Sam looks like he’s about to cry. “They want proof of identification for both of you, which lord knows I don’t have, and proof that I’m your legal guardian, which technically I’m not—not officially, anyway, even if you boys know I love you like you’re my own. I’ll whip everything up this morning and take it over to the school district office after lunch. That ain’t the problem.”

“What _is_ the problem?” Dean asks as he takes a seat shakily back at the kitchen table.

“Well, it’s more like a… little change of plans. It took some sitting around on hold on my part, but Sioux Falls agreed to get your records and transcripts from your last district in Henderson before officially completing the enrollment paperwork, so they can start lookin’ at your coursework and get your schedules all set up ahead of time. Sammy, you’re good to go back to Whittier, same as in sixth grade two years ago.”

Sam nods and smiles a bit from where he’s standing at the sink, turned around to face Dean and Bobby with his butt resting against the counter. Frowning, Dean says, “I’m still going back to—uh—to Washington High, right? It’s still the closest high school to the house, isn’t it?”

“It is, and I tried to get you back in there, buddy, but they wanna put you at Joe Foss this time instead.”

“Joe Foss?”

“It’s a lot closer to Whittier than Washington is—‘bout a ten-minute walk apart, they said. I’ll get you a parking pass, and you can take one of the cars from the yard and drive yourselves every day, huh?”

“Yeah,” says Dean distantly, and then again, “What do they want me at Joe Foss for?”

“Well, I guess they just restructured it last year into an alternative school. They say it’s a better fit based on your transcripts.”

Dean swallows hard, looking stricken. “It’s a special ed school? They’re gonna put me in retard school?”

“Dean, it ain’t—”

“I should go,” mumbles Sam, bowing his head, but Dean snags his wrist as he’s passing. They exchange some kind of look, totally meaningless to Bobby, and then Sam nods a couple times and lets his fingers play over the back of Dean’s chair as he shifts in place.

Bobby clears his throat. “It’s not _retard school_ , Christ, boy. There’s a special ed program, but they ain’t putting you in it. You’ll be doin’ your work in online classes at a—what did the lady call it? ‘Self-paced.’ So you can work on your own with support from the teachers to get caught up before you transfer back to Washington. She says you haven’t got enough credits to graduate just now, but at Joe Foss, you can work ahead to get yourself back on track.”

“Oh,” says Dean, looking shriveled and chewed-up and afraid, and Sam skates a hand to rest on his shoulder and squeeze it.

The boys have always been close, but it strikes Bobby more now than it ever has before, Dean always seeking some excuse not to move even a room away from his brother at any given moment. He’s always got an arm around Sam as they move around the lot like Siamese twins, heading to bed side by side and then coming down for breakfast together in the mornings, Dean’s eyes constantly searching for Sam wherever his brother’s sulking in the room and flicking around anxiously if so much as a trip to the bathroom separates them. Bobby’s not sure how he didn’t notice it until now: Has it really become that much more pronounced than it ever was when they were younger? Did things get _that bad_ in Nevada? He’s sure there were plenty of times he used to put Dean to work in the yard while Sam perused the library inside, but when Bobby suggests that Sam help reorganize his collections of Incan and Mayan lore while Dean’s fiddling with the engine of an old Jeep after school, Dean positively snarls that Sam’s just fine where he’s sitting reading outside.

 “Who the hell do you think I am, boy—your little lap dog? Mind your tone.”

“But—”

“He didn’t mean it, Uncle Bobby—”

“I ain’t talking to you, am I?” Bobby says, crossing his arms as he swivels to face Sam for a moment. The boy shakes his head, mumbling an apology. “I’ll deal with you in a minute. Now, Dean. Have you got a legitimate reason I’m not aware of why your brother can’t leave your eyesight for more’n five minutes at a time?”

Dean doesn’t answer, but his eyes blaze as he rests oil-stained fingers on the metal of the car just beside where the hood’s propped up.

“That’s what I thought. Come on back inside when you get hungry, and I’ll fix us up sloppy joes for supper if you’re ready to adjust your attitude by then, idjit. Sam, let’s go in.”

For a few seconds, Sam stays frozen where he’s sitting cross-legged beside Dean’s feet, but Bobby barks, “Sam!” again and he startles into action, dog-earing his place in the book and traipsing after Bobby into the house.

The boy looks rattled, so he lets him get comfortable working in the quiet for a while before getting his attention again. Sam's eyes are round and unblinking. "Dean's been awful protective of you since you been here," Bobby says as nonchalantly as he can muster.

Sam looks away, bouncing his leg almost violently. "Yeah," he whispers, then adds, louder, "He's always been really overprotective like that."

Bobby chooses his words delicately. "Goes a fair bit beyond just being 'overprotective,' wouldn't you say?" Sam doesn't answer, flips through a couple frayed pages of documents. "Sam. You ain't in any trouble with _me_ , but if you _are_  in trouble, you best say something about it to somebody besides your brother. It ain't gonna do either one of you good to hole up together like this."

"I can't," Sam mutters wildly, his voice cracking all over. "Uncle Bobby, I screwed up really bad this time. It isn't Dean's fault; he's just… trying to help."

It isn't looking like Bobby's going to get much more than that out of Sam, so he takes another swig off his beer can and then reaches across the kitchen table to grip Sam's shoulder. " _Is_  he helping?"

Sam looks surprised for a moment before answering, "I guess. I mean, yeah. But he looks at me like… and he thinks he can fix it all by himself, but he can't."

"Boy, I ain't going to talk in riddles with you, but you know if you need something, all you gotta do is ask."

"Maybe… maybe just me and Dean not to be alone for a while. Is that okay? I know Dad's coming to get us, but if he moves us and then goes away again… I just…"

"Yeah, all right. I'll deal with your daddy, don't you worry," Bobby promises, dragging himself upright to root around on the counter for the brown paper bag he'd picked up when the boys were in school that morning. Sam eyes it curiously as Bobby carries it back across the room and reaches inside. "You shouldn't need to use this anytime soon, but this here is one of them pay-per-minute cell phones. Not exactly a prepaid: it isn't a burner—if you run out of minutes, you can go to any convenience store and buy more."

Frowning, Sam accepts it and turns it over in his hands. "Like the one Dad gave Dean last year?"

"Just like that. I programmed in both their numbers, and one of mine, and Sam, if you ever need help—if Dean can't get a hold of your dad, or somebody's not takin' good care of you—I want you to know you can _always_  call me, all right? You don't gotta wait for Dean to do it first."

"Thank you, Uncle Bobby," he mutters, looking a little thunderstruck, and Bobby hopes to hell that Sam will take the offer.

-

Dean and Sam have been in Sioux Falls for over two weeks before Dad arrives, the car pulling into the yard at one in the morning with a familiar growl that they can both hear from their bedroom. They can also hear the fight that erupts out on the porch almost immediately after Dad parks the car, Bobby probably assuming they're asleep inside, but Dean hasn't really gotten a good night's sleep since… Michigan last year, to be honest, though it's started taking a bigger toll since they left for South Dakota.

"He can't take us away," Sammy mumbles, turning his face into Dean's chest and clinging a little tighter to his waist. Sighing, Dean lets him, lays an anxious palm on Sam's back where the kid is sweating through his T-shirt.

Dean gets nightmares now, ugly things with Sam's corpse torn up and naked in front of him, and he'll wake up mid-moan with his brother, warm and mostly whole, whispering to him and dotting kisses all over Dean's cheeks and forehead like Dean used to do for him sometimes when they were really little. After Dean blinks awake, Sam usually holds him till he calms, or maybe presses his mouth to the very corner of Dean's, just barely missing his lips, and Dean can feel him staring at him in the dark when he invariably turns his face away from it. He doesn't like leaning on Sammy, but Sam has bad dreams, too, just more quietly than Dean does, and he says it helps pull him out of his mind to be the one taking care of Dean for once, so Dean allows it.

“It’ll all work out in the morning, buddy,” he says now, rubbing sleep-slow circles into Sam’s back and pulling him in closer. “It’ll be Friday. You’ll get to see all your friends and your teachers before the weekend; you’ll like that, huh? I’ll be waiting outside to come pick you up, and maybe we can get ice cream before we come back to the house, would you like that?”

“Yeah,” Sam sighs, nervous and so small there in bed with Dean, his cold-ass little toes tucked up against Dean’s calves.

“And when we get back here, we’ll work on cars together in the yard, and maybe Dad will even have something I can teach you how to do on the Impala.”

“ _You’d_ like that,” says Sam, and Dean can practically _feel_ Sammy’s eyes rolling even with the kid’s face buried in Dean’s armpit.

“Shut up. You love spending time with me,” Dean dismisses, and Sam shivers. “We can help Bobby make us all dinner. And on Saturday, he might even make pancakes or bacon or somethin’ for when we wake up. That sound good, Sammy? I’ll let you shower first, so you’ll soak up all the hot water, and you’ll be warm and full and get to sleep in as late as you want, hmm?”

“Okay, Dean.”

Sammy sounds like he might finally be starting to nod off a little, so Dean leans close to his ear and tells him, low and husky, “Sleep, Sammy.”

“No… I want to be here, with you, where we’re…”

“Shh. Just listen to my voice.”

It doesn’t take long for Sam to drift off after that: Dean can feel Sammy’s breath in his ear go shallow and rhythmic as Dean mumbles a stream of nonsense to him. Dean stays awake, frozen in place as he strains to make out the words shouted from the porch, and when he finally does slip into an anxious sleep, it isn’t for long.

When Dean and Sam hit the kitchen the next morning for breakfast, you would need a goddamn machete to slice through the tension between Dad and Bobby. Dad’s swirling his coffee around in its chipped mug where he’s hunched over the counter, avoiding the fuck out of where Bobby’s got lore books spread out across the table, a plate of some kind of omelet monstrosity balanced precariously on the pages of a massive Arabic tome. Hovering a half-step behind Dean, Sammy clams right up, and Dean knows exactly what he’s wondering (because he’s thinking it, too)—but Dad just chugs down some coffee, grimacing, and says without inflection, “Hello, boys.”

“Sir,” they chorus, Sam a little stiffly, Dean a little weakly.

“Eggs are on the stove for you,” Bobby tells them with that forced-calm air he always adopts whenever Dad is around. “Go on. You’re runnin’ late for school already, Dean; don’t stand there and make it worse for yourself.”

Sammy’s unsteady breath whooshes in his ear as Dean swallows hard and grabs hold of one of the plates Bobby’s laid out on the counter for them, and Sam follows, keeping maybe a half-foot further away from Dean than he would have the day before. Dean feels every inch like a chasm opening up in the middle of the floor.

It’s a relief to finally clamber outside a quarter of an hour later and climb into the old Chrysler Fifth Avenue that Bobby’s designated as Dean’s for the duration of their stay. Sam stares moodily out the passenger-side window and doesn’t speak until they’ve crossed the underpass below I-229 into the busy downtown that makes up the bulk of Sioux Falls, with its familiar old brick and sprawling ranches. “Dad’s going to take us away again,” he says finally, so quietly that Dean almost misses it beneath the low thunder of the car engine.

“You don’t know that.”

“It’s just a matter of time.”

“Sammy, _please_.” Sam looks at him then, and his face is tight and frantic like it is usually these days. “We will be okay. Nothing’s going to happen again like—like it did before. You don’t gotta do that _ever_ again.”

The light they’ve been stalled at turns green then, and Dean reluctantly tears his eyes off of Sammy, but drops one hand from the wheel onto Sam’s knee, rubbing it gently. “You’re still eating funny,” Sam points out sullenly.

“Yeah, well, it’s just that my metabolism got all jacked up last month, and I’m still getting it back to normal. But that’s never gonna happen again, all right?”

Dean can see his brother turn away from out the corner of his eye as Sammy hums skeptically. He _is_ being at least half-honest with Sam: it’s by cutting down his portion sizes over the last two few weeks that Dean’s managed to stop throwing up his meals, for the most part, and he’s working his way up to feeling comfortable with a full stomach again. He even called Sonny to check in when he was waiting to get Sammy from Whittier yesterday afternoon, although he hasn’t been able to return any of the six or seven missed calls he’s gotten from Mounia in the past two and a half weeks.

Dean feels bad for ditching her without any warning, but at least his studies at Joe Foss are—good, _really_ good, if he’s being honest. He spent most of his first week taking placement and mastery exams to determine where his knowledge gaps are in the classes he’d failed after the couple of semesters when Dad had unenrolled him from a school during midterms or finals, or because he’d had too many absences to earn credit for having attended that semester. Since then, he’s been working through computer modules to teach himself material identified as his weaknesses by his entrance exams. Starting out with freshman-level modules for curriculum that he simply never encountered while enrolled in a school was pretty mortifying, but Dean’s been able to breeze rather efficiently through his make-up coursework from classes like algebra and health, and he’s mostly moved onto more advanced work, including continuing some of his classes from the current semester that he was taking in Nevada.

He’s never cared too much about school before, besides knowing that it’s important to Sammy that he graduate from high school. Even though Dean can see the value in some of the course content, much of it has always been pretty far removed from actual useful applications, and anyway, he usually misses too much school for it to be worth even trying. But he likes the vibe he gets from the program at Joe Foss, being able to work through the content that _Dean_ needs to make up, with teachers on hand in the computer lab who don’t look at him like he’s some kind of loser. There are two of them for Dean’s twenty-person lab, one math and science teacher and one humanities teacher, and they go around checking up on people’s progress and seem genuinely enthusiastic when somebody asks a question, which is a cool change from how most teachers just get annoyed about having to slow down the class.

Dean hasn’t really made friends since starting at Joe Foss. He thinks he might recognize a couple of his classmates from Washington when he was enrolled there for part of tenth grade, but that was a lot of schools ago, and it could just be that they look familiar because they remind him of completely different people from different towns—it’s happened to him before. Either way, Dean doesn’t really mind, because it helps to get his shit done and not have to think about anything else during school hours, and besides, he’s got Sam to keep him company the rest of the time.

He gets to pick which subjects he works on every day, so after he checks in that morning and loads up his homepage, he scrutinizes his subject list for a long moment before clicking _Physics_ and selecting a lesson at random. He’d tried taking physics as a junior, found it freakin’ _hard_ but still interesting, but in something like March of that year, they’d moved to a _real_ backwoods rural town with an abysmal literacy rate and an underfunded public school district to match, where Dean’s new physics class skated over all math entirely and addressed simplified concepts only. By the time he moved back to civilization two months later, he was totally lost and had to drop physics in lieu of some other science elective he’d probably still not gotten credit for—it might’ve been psychology—because he was only registered in the class for a month before the school year ended. Dean’s had to spend some time reteaching himself vectors and free-body diagrams—even the one-semester credit he _did_ earn in physics that fall was a while ago—but if all goes well, he’ll wrap up Newtonian mechanics in the next week or two and move onto waves or E&M, which could have cool applications for understanding hauntings a little better: he’s seen Dad use EMF readers before to detect spiritual presences.

Most of the morning passes in a haze of centrifugal motion calculations before Dean takes his lunch break and then spends the last couple hours of the school day on a research project for English comp. All his English and social studies modules have so far been oriented toward skills—research, writing, and reading comprehension—instead of regurgitating historical events or book plots, and that’s been chill, too. Loathe as he is to admit it, Dean’s going to miss Joe Foss when they transfer him back to Washington, if Dad doesn’t move them again first.

When he goes to get Sammy from the middle school that afternoon, the kid curls up on the bench seat and wordlessly places his head in Dean’s lap. Gritting his teeth, Dean cards one hand through Sam’s hair as he drives them to the nearest ice cream parlor. Last week, they spent an afternoon after school at Sam’s request at the local public library—actually a pretty big place, since Sioux Falls proper is a pretty substantial major city—and while Sammy was geeking out in the sci-fi and fantasy section, Dean snuck into the social welfare section to scan through a few texts on rape, child abuse, and suicide. It freaked him the hell out just looking up the Dewey Decimal numbers for what he needed, let alone putting words like those to Sammy, _Dean’s_ Sammy, but what he turned up in the two hours before they left the library helped explain some things, even if every ten seconds Dean kept jumping and looking over his shoulder. Apparently, it’s not uncommon for victims or whoever to try taking back control by seeking out consensual sex, even if it’s reckless or unsafe, which only further solidifies his determination to keep his relationship with Sam completely platonic. He tries to be gentle about it—he doesn’t want Sam to feel ashamed for the way he’s reacting to what he’s been through—but Dean doesn’t want to do anything to traumatize the kid even more down the road, either. Thirteen years old is nowhere near old enough to give informed consent to prostitution, for fuck’s sake, much less because Sammy felt obligated to provide income for their food and shelter: the last thing he needs is to tack on his big brother to the list of people who have… who _hurt_ him like that.

Dean hasn’t asked for details about that night—who did it, how many times, what they made Sam do—and Sammy hasn’t offered any, either. He’s started to automatically cuddle up to Dean every time they’re alone, though, and Dean doesn’t know what else to do but to go along with it. It makes him uncomfortable—and it makes him feel equally guilty for liking it—but if it comforts Sam, then it’s the least that Dean owes him for failing him so spectacularly before they finally hauled ass to South Dakota.

Sammy perks up a little, at least, when he sees Dean eat his whole waffle cone: one scoop of moose tracks, one of chocolate fudge. For Dean's time in the salvage yard, Bobby's been giving him eight bucks an hour—better even than minimum wage—and he's been hoarding most of it in his duffel but using the rest to pay for _anything_  they need, relishing the feel of hard cash in his hand that keeps coming every day he works. Since Bobby started fabricating reasons to bring Sam inside whenever he tries reading in the yard, Dean's cut down a little on his work hours, but not by much: he wants to build up a reserve stash in case he has more trouble finding a job the next time they move.

He kicks at Sam's feet under the table and grabs a handful of straws just so he can blow the wrappers at Sammy until the kid's smile finally cracks wide. On the ride back to Bobby's house, they hold hands across the seat, but Sammy quickly retracts his own hand as soon as Dean turns off of North Bahnson onto the meandering drive that dead-ends into the unpaved salvage lot.

Generally speaking, Bobby's a pretty straight shooter, even if Dad's too paranoid to ever share much of what he's really thinking with anybody. When you get them together around Dean and Sammy, though, they get convinced they need to curb their fighting in front of the boys to protect them or something, and it becomes nearly impossible to get a straight answer out of either of them about anything that's going on. Sure enough, when they clobber inside to find Dad alone in the library, Dean can only get a cursory summary of his last hunt out of him in the ten minutes before Bobby comes in from the lot and Dad changes the subject abruptly.

At ten o'clock sharp, Dean and Sam bid the adults goodnight and dart upstairs. Knocking elbows where they crowd together at the bathroom sink, they brush their teeth side by side, and then Sammy hops in the shower while Dean takes a piss and shaves. He does it slower than he needs to, striping the razor slowly and methodically along his jaw, and he kills some time giving Sam shit about his floral-scented shampoo from the other side of the opaque shower curtain before finally retreating to their bedroom while Sammy finishes up. It's easier now that Dean's used to them separating for school during the day, but he's still edgy and tense until Sam returns from the bathroom in briefs and a T-shirt with a towel wrapped melodramatically around his stupid hair. Showers are awful because Sammy always takes entirely longer than is necessary in there, within arm's reach of all sorts of razors, and Dean never knows whether Sam is spanking it or just lathering up real good with the fruity body wash he likes to buy when they can afford it or whether he's—well—doing some shit in there that's going to get him dead on the floor of the tub with his veins ripped open.

Dean skips showering in favor of shutting off the lights as quickly as possible, so that he and Sam can try to make out what Dad and Bobby are saying to each other downstairs when they think that the boys are asleep. It's warm under the half-dozen quilts and blankets that Bobby's got layered on top of their mattress, but Dean still thinks it's wholly unnecessary that Sam curls up in the bed with him with _this_  much of his skin bare, given that they're in South Dakota in the middle of February. For his part, Dean's got on sweatpants and a Henley, but his hands and neck burn where they touch Sammy's soft, clean skin.

They bicker lightheartedly in whispers and keep their ears open until Bobby finally quits bitching about all the idjits whose cars apparently broke down and needed towing today and Dad breaks in to ask something about the boy's schooling, too quietly to fully make it out. Dean shushes Sam, which of course prompts Sammy to shush Dean, and by the time either of them actually quiets long enough to make out the voices coming from the living room, they've missed the first part of the conversation.

"—At Whittier, but that's no surprise. He's always been good at school. Don't fit in great with the other kids, but he usually finds a couple of teachers to click with, even if they don't get to know him that good before he moves away again."

Dad sounds _pissed_  when he cuts Bobby off to say, "Don't you sit there and criticize—"

"Johnny, if I wanted to 'criticize' your parenting, I'd've done it outright with any piece of the ample ammunition I coulda used. That there, though—that's just a fact. Teachers got other, more assertive kids in the class to split their attention, and it ain't exactly appropriate for any of 'em to call and keep in touch when Sam leaves the district. But the boys don't know it, but I've been calling their teachers to check in on them this week."

Dean stiffens, while Sam peeks up from where his face is plastered against Dean's collarbone to stare at him in fear or maybe shock. Idly scratching Sam's scalp, Dean shakes his head and strains to listen in further. "And?" Dad is saying, and there's a pause—maybe he's letting out a big sigh—before he goes on.

“Sammy’s doing great on his assignments, but more than one of his teachers say he seems like he’s having problems concentrating when they’re lecturing—”

“You didn’t tell me that,” Dean breathes, and Sam starts shushing him again.

“—Like him,” Dad is saying when Dean tunes back in. “Sammy _lives_ for school. For Christ’s sake, he blows a gasket every time I move them in the middle of a quarter. I would’ve thought he’d be overjoyed to be going back to a school he’s attended before.”

Bobby pauses again before saying, “I think it got real bad in Nevada, John,” and then his voice drops too low to make out.

“Sammy,” Dean whispers, but Sam completely freezes up and twists his neck vigorously from side to side, his breath hot and wet and shallow where it puffs out right up against Dean’s neck.

It’s not long, however, before he hears Dad’s voice rise again in anger, and Dean squeezes his eyes shut: it’s only a matter of time now before the shouting starts. “—Supposed to stay in the house until I came back for them. The rent money was more than enough to cover food, and the landlord wouldn’t have kicked up much fuss for at least a month, probably longer. If they had just thought—”

“I told you before, and I’ll say it again: it is on you for not making damn sure they knew what to do before you stopped checking your messages.”

“You know this line of work, Bobby: you know people will die if I’m half in the hunt and half still back with my sons.”

“Sam is a _child_ , and Dean is as good as! They’re both still in school. If there’s any chance at all you’re going to be away from them for more than, say, a week, bring them here! Take them to Jim’s! Don’t just—”

“You are _not_ their father. _I_ am their father, and _I_ decide how I’m gonna raise my own children.”

“I love those boys more than you have in the entire time I’ve known you—”

“Shut the hell up, Bob. You don’t even _see_ my boys hardly at all. It’s been years since you saw them last, and it’ll be years before you do again if you don’t learn some goddamn fucking respect.”

“They called _me_ for help when _you_ dropped the ball. Did you forget that? You expect me to do your job with them until it’s convenient for you to show up and make choices for them based on the jack squat you know about their lives—”

The fight doesn’t end there, but that’s the point at which Dean stops paying such close attention to it, because Sammy sniffs hugely and mumbles, “Uncle Bobby doesn’t hate us, right?”

Startled, Dean meets Sam’s eyes as Sammy lifts up from where he’s sprawled on top of Dean’s chest to prop himself up, his hands bracketing Dean’s face. In the dim, vague city light filtering in through the window, his face looks a little blotchy already. “What?” says Dean. “No, of course he don’t hate us. Why would you think that?”

“He just said he resents taking care of us like this.”

Dean extends a wobbly hand above his own face to brush the long bangs out of Sam’s puffed-up eyes. “No, Sammy. No way. He’s pissed at Dad _because_ he cares about us. He wants us to stay with him, you know that.”

“I don’t ever want to leave,” Sam croaks, and he winces at the renewed shouting from below.

Slipping his palm along Sammy’s soft little cheek, Dean nods weakly. “Yeah, buddy. I know you don’t.”


	2. Chapter 2

Dean manages to avoid talking to Dad one-on-one until Monday evening, when Dad is sitting at the kitchen table as Dean comes inside from the salvage yard. “Sit down a minute, Deano,” says Dad, and it’s hard to predict what he’s going to be like from hour to hour, but—he’s smiling, and Dean relaxes by a fraction. Dad’s got this way of looking at you, sometimes, all warm and open and approving, like you’re the only other person who means squat to him, and the days Dad looks at Dean like that are always good days.

Still, it’s with some reluctance that Dean shuffles forward and lays a hand on the back of an empty chair. “I was gonna go find Sammy. Is he—?”

“You can find your brother later,” says Dad, and Dean understands it to be an order. “I want to talk man to man with you for the moment.”

Even though Dad’s eyes are crinkled kindly at the corners, Dean can’t help feeling a familiar surge of guilt while he drags back the chair and sinks down into it. “About what happened…”

“I’ve been meaning to talk it through with you,” Dad says when Dean can’t find the words to continue. “You never should have seen the money run that low, even without a credit card. My mistake: I thought you knew what to do for yourselves to stretch it long enough to last.”

Dean bows his head. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Never mind: even on a hunt, even out of contact, I shouldn’t have assumed your instincts would be good without the experience to back them. Dean—I need you to understand that I wouldn’t have left you to handle it on your own if I hadn’t believed you were capable of managing the situation.”

He lifts his chin a little until he can see Dad’s face. His forehead is carved with hard lines, and his mouth curls downward in a frown, but his eyes are still soft and present. Dean flushes. He doesn’t fully understand the shame curling in his gut, but he can still understand a direct order when he hears one. “I know, sir. I’ll do better next time.”

Dad sighs, and Dean can’t help feeling like he somehow answered wrong, but what more does Dad want Dean to give him? “It’s all right, son. Now, your mistake last month was moving out of the house when the rent came due. Landlords will generally give you a few months to catch up on payments before filing a formal eviction. You may run into problems sooner if you’re also behind on bills, or if your utilities are included in your rent payment and your landlord shuts off the lights or the water, but—”

“You’re joking, right?”

Dad falls abruptly silent as Dean whips around to see Sam standing in the doorway, eyes narrow and cheeks drained of color. “Go upstairs, Sammy. This doesn’t concern you,” says Dad.

“Oh, but it concerns Dean?”

“Dean is an adult—”

“Is that what you’re telling yourself now? Because he was barely a teenager by the time you started skipping out on us for weeks at a time!”

“—And he has the emotional maturity, which _you_ clearly don’t, to understand we have to make sacrifices for the job sometimes.”

Working his throat, Sam breathes hard and doesn’t seem to register it when Dean mumbles his name. Finally, he says, “Well, it’s not your place to decide that for us, not when it means _your children_ are going hungry. Tell him, Dean.”

But Dean can barely close his jaw to swallow, let alone prepare and deliver a manifesto on everything that went wrong in Nevada, especially not when he _knows_ he could have stopped the worst of it if he’d just—kept down what he’d eaten, watched Sam more closely. “Sammy, please,” he mumbles instead, glancing back at Dad—the hard set has spread to his eyes now.

“But Dean—”

“I’ll meet you in the bedroom later. Go on.”

“Typical,” Sam hisses, and then he screams a little in the back of his throat and stomps his feet all the way up the stairs. Dad rolls his eyes, and Dean can’t help feeling like he’s failed them both—that old sink of his stomach—pissed that there’s supposed to be something more he can do to hold his family together.

For what feels like months but can’t actually be more than a few days, Sammy ignores Dean during mealtimes and car rides, bucks off Dean’s hands in bed to curl up alone along the edge of the mattress. It scares Dean a little how quickly he’s grown to need Sam close not just mentally but physically, too, and it _hurts_ to keep to his side of the bed. The worst of it are Sam’s long-ass nightly showers, even harder to stand now that a locked door separates Dean from the security of knowing Sam isn’t hurting himself in there.

It’s been nearly a whole week by the time Sam finally snaps, rolling into Dean’s chest after a long hour-plus of sleeplessness. Dean’s hands scrabble against Sam’s back, clutching at his T-shirt, while he noses into Sammy’s damp hair and breathes deep. “I’m still mad at you,” Sam says, and he sounds resigned and a little drowsy. “This doesn’t change anything.”

“Yeah, I missed you, too, little bro,” says Dean, chuckling at Sam’s answering huff.

The following morning, his teachers point him to the counseling office before he’s even had the chance to settle in and log into a computer. It’s Dean’s first time meeting his guidance counselor, a heavyset but ill-endowed woman in maybe her early forties who introduces herself as Ms. Annalise Everett with a firm handshake. His heart is thudding absurdly as he takes a seat in the armchair opposite hers across the desk: it’s not like getting decent grades in school counts for much of anything, unlike outsmarting a vengeful spirit would, or even finding a job he could use to feed Sammy.

“We’re all excited to have you here at Joe Foss,” says Ms. Everett with a predictably cryptic smile. “I’ve heard good things from your teachers, who tell me they believe the alternative program is a good fit for your skills.”

“ _Do_ they, now?” Dean drawls, but Everett just smiles even wider.

“You’re certainly succeeding academically: Mr. Harrington tells me you’ve been completing your modules at nearly twice the rate of most of our students.” Surprised, he doesn’t respond, and she presses, “But we want to hear from you, Dean, in your words. You’ve been with us for nearly a month: how do _you_ feel that you’re doing here?”

“Uh,” he says eloquently.

“Let’s talk about why you came to Joe Foss, to start.”

“I enrolled ‘cause you people wouldn’t let me go to Washington High.”

“It’s my understanding that it was your uncle who spoke to the district administrators who matched you to our school. Had _you_ wanted to attend Washington, as well?”

“Well, yeah.” When Everett just nods encouragingly at him, Dean swallows and adds, “I did a few months there in tenth the last time we crashed with Bobby—the last time he, uh, had custody. I don’t know, I guess I just thought it’d be easiest to go back—same people, maybe some of the same teachers.”

“And now? Do you resent your placement here?”

Dean shrugs: he _could_ tell Everett that retard school is still humiliating whichever way you slice it, but he already knows Washington won’t take him if he gets himself kicked out, and he made Sammy a promise, however meaningless a high school diploma may be. Besides, Dean may not like Ms. Annalise Everett and her perpetual patronizing smile, but it’s kind of cool to have somebody actually ask what Dean thinks, not just tell him what he thinks is wrong—kind of new and interesting.

So he says instead, “It’s fine, I guess. It’s cool working on what I actually need for once.”

She nods again, looking marginally more satisfied than before. “I’m glad to hear that you feel that way. Most students in your program transition from the online modules to classroom learning, first here and then in one of our traditional high schools, once they’ve made up any missing credits, but if you continue to excel at self-paced coursework—”

“I want to stay in the credit lab,” says Dean without thinking, and Everett cracks yet another smile. “I mean, can I? Is that an option?”

“It’s an option,” she confirms. “In your case, I think it may well be your best option. Were you to return to Washington, you’d be on track to graduate after one additional semester this fall—”

“ _Another_ —”

“—But at the pace you’ve been studying on your own, we’re projecting graduation for you with just a few extra weeks of schooling that we could accommodate this June and July in our facilities. If that’s something that interests you—”

“It does,” Dean says quickly. “I want to get done.” _Before I move again_ , he doesn’t add.

-

John jerks awake with sweat pooling inside his jeans and drool plastering his cheek to the desk in Bobby’s living room. A few seconds pass before he realizes he must have nodded off while trying to make sense out of the Middle English tome lying beside his head—that he’s in Sioux Falls with his boys, not with the goddamn ghoul pack from Utah that only survives any longer in his all-too-vivid imagination. Unpeeling his face from the scuffed wood and checking his watch, he breathes out his relief to find it’s barely noon: Sam and Dean will still be in school, won’t have seen him passed out to jump to their own conclusions about why.

The stupidest thing about it is that this wasn’t even the first time John’s met ghouls: he took one out in Wisconsin back in ’89 or ’90. There’s no rational reason for him to be having goddamn nightmares, like a little _kid_ , about the ones he just took down. Sure, they don’t usually travel in groups of more than two or three, max, but the hunt itself had gone off without a hitch, at least once John realized it was ghouls that were responsible for the homicides, and so the stress of the job is no excuse for him to be dreaming about ghouls taking Mary’s appearance, taunting him with blood bubbling from their mouths, the acrid smell of charred flesh pulsing out from the blubber melting off their bones—

No: he’s not going to entertain this—sick fantasy, wherever it’s coming from. Even if he’s just feeling guilty—but the other thing is, John has no reason to feel guilty for taking this hunt. Ghouls may normally be nonviolent scavengers, and he may not have known that the first time he took one out, but _this_ pack had killed two people already. Whether the murders had been premeditated or accidental—whether or not those two poor bastards who saw the faces of their dead loved ones and confronted them had initiated the conflicts that had caused their deaths—was irrelevant. Monsters have no humanity and, therefore, have nothing worth protecting, and any monster that says otherwise is out to save its own hide: John found that out the hard way several times over as a rookie back in the ‘80s.

If he’d gone back to his boys like he’d wanted to after ganking that werewolf terrorizing Vegas and the string of restless spirits in Arizona after it… _maybe_ the ghouls would’ve become benign once they learned to cover their tracks more closely, but he’d had no way of knowing that for sure, especially when he’d originally believed he had been dealing with skinwalkers. John would probably get himself _and_ his boys killed if he didn’t totally compartmentalize the job, chasing down leads one after another with his boys tucked away in a neighboring state. Ever since he nearly got his kids killed by that shtriga when they were both little—but he knows better now. Sam and Dean are safer alone, even hungry, than with John during any hunt that’s not routine enough to use to train them. Sammy can bitch all he wants about wanting to settle down somewhere, but there ain’t enough hunters to go around—who else is gonna put a stop to the things, if not John?

He scrapes slow fingers down the sides of his face and stands, kicking the rickety chair legs out from underneath him. When he strides into the kitchen, Bobby shoos him away with one phone under his ear and the hold signal flickering on the cradle of another, and John groans before traipsing out to the yard toward the Impala.

His bones settle just a bit when the car purrs to life beneath his fingertips. Singer Salvage is hardly a short two miles north of the crowded Hy-Vee jammed onto Highway 42 near the edge of downtown Sioux Falls, but as John takes the familiar route past the Big Sioux River and swings right onto Rice, he could be driving through any one of the no-name towns where he’s tried to make a home for his boys these past fourteen years, for all anybody could tell. On either side of the roadway, ramshackle little cottages—most of them probably abandoned—are buried sparsely between the trees, a dense knotting of shivering pine needles and branches rendered barren by the February air.

He takes the long way around to the Hy-Vee, detouring from Cleveland onto Madison and following the meandering path through progressively bigger family homes and past Dean’s last high school, Washington, on Third Street. It’s a larger, newer building than the alternative school Bobby enrolled him in this time around, and John squeezes the wheel as he feels his forehead creasing tight. He hooks a right onto Sycamore and another onto the highway, where traffic is busier, but not too bad for noontime on a Friday. Sioux Falls is massive by South Dakota standards—well over a hundred thousand people and growing fast, John imagines, from the influx of traffic and housing he’s noticed in the years he’s been traveling back and forth to Bobby’s—but still small enough to put plenty of green space between buildings and cap many of them at one story tall, in the same easy spirit of most small towns in the Heartland.

John feels a bit ridiculous as he pulls into the Hy-Vee lot and snags himself a stray cart from near where he parks the car, but he sets his jaw and pushes the trolley past the sliding doors and into the store. Only briefly lingering outside the spirits aisle, he loads up instead with produce and the biggest roast he can find, already scowling at the thought of having to whittle away his afternoon cooking the damn thing.

After savoring the experience of anonymity in the checkout line—John never likes how noticeable he becomes over the course of living in a small town—he foots the bill with proceeds from his nights of hustling in Utah. Mercifully, Bobby spares him the ugly confrontation John’s expecting and instead contents himself with a couple of glares between phone calls while John sears the loin, dumps in the vegetables, and clangs around all the cupboards looking for spices.

The pork is well on its way to done, the aroma of oregano wafting through half the house, by the time the kids return from school. He hears the clanging of the front door and the pounding of boots well before Dean and Sammy come up on the kitchen, where John’s pulled up a chair by the stove and is flipping absently through his journal. “Hello, boys,” he says, glancing up at them to take inventory. They look strong, if a bit slouched: rosy-cheeked from the cold outside, no cuts or bruises or burns, Dean crowded up against Sam’s back.

“Dad,” says Dean stiffly, while Sam just mumbles, “Hello, sir.”

“Roast should be just about ready to eat. Go find Bobby, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” the boys chorus, and John lets out a long whoosh of a breath.

It may have been a long time since he’s last done something like this, but his hands still easily maneuver the meal out of the pot and apportion it onto Bobby’s chipped floral plates. Sam and Dean file back into the kitchen behind Bobby, who narrows his eyes at John while he crosses to the fridge to fetch himself a beer.

When they all sit down to eat, the room falls too quiet, only broken by the clatter of utensils and the smack of open-mouthed chewing. The pork feels overdone—dry—but the potatoes are good, and John works through the whole serving methodically. Both boys only pick at their own, however: Dean in particular does little more than cut off pieces to push around his plate. “You’re not hungry?” John finally asks.

“I’m sorry, sir. We—didn’t know you were cooking, so I took Sammy to get ice cream on the way home.”

John takes a bigger bite of meat, drags out the process of chewing through it. “School goin’ good?”

“I guess.”

“Charming all the ladies like your old man taught you?”

“Well, _Sammy’s_ still a blushing turnip anytime he gets within ten feet of a girl, but—hey!” Dean interjects when a dull thud from underneath the table interrupts him.

The boys dutifully clear the table after the meal, stowing the leftovers in the fridge and rinsing off the dishes, but both scarper off to their bedroom before John has the time to work out what to say to them—how to engage. Bobby advises him not to take it personally—“They’ve been doin’ a lot of that lately,” he growls with a pointed look that makes John question how truthful he’s being—but when John tucks into the couch for bed that night, he can’t help going over the thing in his mind: how close they are, how _skittish_ , and what little they’ve said to him and Bobby both this past week.

The hunting life being what it is, it’s no wonder John hasn’t cooked for his kids nearly as much as he’d intended when Dean and Sammy were still small. He remembers Mary laughing off the store-bought soups she used to burn while reheating them on the stovetop—digging through his mother’s old recipes to prepare the perfect combination of dishes on his weekends off—he’d gotten to be handy in the kitchen as a teenager, trying to help Mom out as much as he could the more time passed after his father had skipped out. Pork roast had been one of Mom’s favorites: simple but hearty.

John dreams of gunshots to his mother’s face that night, wakes up tangled in a mess of blankets at half past four in the morning.

He gives himself as long as it takes to scrub clean in the shower to dwell on the memory of it and shake off the sleep. Within a quarter of an hour, he’s relegated the images to the back of his mind and is climbing the stairs to the second story two at a time, not bothering to tread quietly. Bobby’s guestroom is straight ahead off the narrow hall that leads away from the stairs and winds across the top floor of the house, and John doesn’t bother to knock before turning the handle and banging on the light. “Dean, Sammy. Get up. I want you dressed and ready downstairs in ten.”

It takes the boys a few moments to rouse themselves, and as John’s eyes adjust to the light, he suddenly realizes that what he’s interrupted—but he can’t be _interrupting_ anything, can he? Sammy and Dean haven’t ever—not since they were small has John known them to—to curl up into each other like that, Dean’s upper body engulfing Sam’s back and shoulders, their arms thrown together and fingers enmeshed over top of a wad of blankets—and John’s again hit with the too-familiar feeling that his boys are… he’s here, on one side of the doorway, worn-out and terrified on their behalf, and Dean and Sam are in some other broken-open place where if John could just reach them—

Dean is the first to grunt and blink into wakefulness, pulling Sammy closer into his body for a fleeting second as his head whips around, seeking out the threat—and when instead he finds John, his sleep-crinkled eyes widen and he shoves his brother out of his arms. “Dad? What the—is everything—?”

“You haven’t been on a hunt in two months, and you haven’t run a lap or shot a gun in almost as long, far as I can tell. You’re only gonna get sloppier the longer I keep letting you slack off from your training. I want you both ready for target practice by oh-five-hundred, I mean it.” He considers adding a knock to how should know they’re both too old for sleeping—together—like this anymore, but the words feel filthy somehow as he rolls them through his mind, tracking the way Sam reaches sleepily for Dean until his eyes latch onto John’s and widen.

John doesn’t say another word about it, just yanks the door shut and tromps back downstairs to wait in the study for them to get ready. His pulse is racing; his stomach feels like it’s gonna jump up into his throat and stay there. Sam and Dean are jumpy and unfocused when they finally come down, but John genuinely can’t figure whether they’re acting any more restless than they already have for this whole stint in Sioux Falls.

He studies them as he puts them to work, first cleaning the guns, then taking them apart and putting them together again against a beat-up old stopwatch. Dean’s fingers fumble and drop the parts, and Sammy’s usually nimble fingers move sluggishly—whether with drowsiness or something more sinister, John can’t say definitively.

Stopping them once they’ve been at it for a while, John fishes in his jean pockets for a moment, then pulls out two nickels and balances one each on the barrel of each handgun directly atop the front sight. “Aim for the wall and dry fire,” he instructs. “On my count—one—two—three—”

He hears two soft _click_ s as his boys do as he tells them. Sam’s coin wobbles in place; Dean’s falls off the top of the gun entirely and spins around in tight circles on the kitchen countertop.

“Your aim will improve if you refine your grip so the sights don’t move when you pull the trigger. Again—keep going.”

They’ve moved past dry fire drills and have just begun shooting paper targets in the clearing behind the scrap yard when Bobby thunders out of the house, hands on his hips like a trumped-up soccer mom and steam practically billowing out of his ears. “What the devil do you think you’re doing shooting off rounds in _my_ yard at half past six in the morning?”

“Oh, here we go,” John mutters, but if Bobby hears him, he doesn’t seem to care to pick a fight.

“Get over here, Johnny! I want a word with you!”

“Dad—” Dean looks so much like his mother that John can hardly stand it when he turns to look at him, Dean’s bottom lip chewed red and cast in an uncertain frown.

“Laps, both of you. Go,” says John.

Bobby waits until the boys have taken off around the bend of trees and out of eyesight before he rounds on John, a frown chiseled onto his lined forehead.  “You can’t just go shootin’ off pistols at the crack of dawn, Johnny! This is _Sioux Falls_ , not some hick backwoods town where nobody ain’t gonna think twice about hearing rounds fired—”

“No: you live alone on three and a half acres of land on a dead-end dirt road that’s barely within city limits. If a tree falls in a fucking forest and nobody’s—”

“Oh, fuck off with that. I don’t need the sheriff on my ass because someone called the cops about shots going off at all hours of the day and night, and neither do you. You want them calling the boys’ schools, maybe ringin’ up Child Protection if they don’t like what they see? Wait till it’s daylight next time, idjit.”

Bobby thinks he’s real tough smarming in John’s face like a goddamn law-abiding citizen, but when he goes to turn away and crawl back into his house, he stops short when John sneers back at him, “You can hide behind your telephones and avoid the real work all you want, Bobby, but my boys ain’t going to grow up defenseless. I won’t have it.”

“Oh yeah? At what friggin’ cost?” snarls Bobby. “Have you even bothered to notice how skinny they are? How they flinch every time a fucking pin drops or _you_ walk into a room?”

“Let them,” says John coolly. “Every hunter’s got somethin’ to make him piss himself and wake up screaming. My boys can man up and brush off a little hunger or a nightmare just like the rest of us, but not if I get them _killed_ first.”

“Ain’t gonna have no life worth living if you raise ‘em to be scared of their own shadows,” Bobby smarms at him, but as far as John is concerned, this conversation is an utter waste of his time: he’s already shouldering roughly past Bobby and off of the porch.

Bobby may be halfway to retired—he may not know what John knows about the demon, about _Sam_ —but even so, he’s a hunter: he should know better than to think the boys will be safe if John leaves them unprotected. Maybe he’ll take a hunt soon, he muses as he waits with his arms crossed over his chest for his boys to come back around. Apparently, he knows how to make a hell of a lot more of a difference in the world out there than he does with anything left for him here.

He raises the point that evening, after his boys have gone up to the guestroom for the night and Bobby’s had the whole day to pound on cars and blow off steam. “Got anything local?” John asks quietly as he hovers in the doorway between the kitchen and the main room, tipping his head to rest against the frame.

Bobby scowls at him through a mouthful of the day-old lo mein he’d fished out for supper. “You mean a case.”

“I do,” says John, because there aren’t two ways about it and it won’t do him any favors to beat around the bush. “I’m not… good with them, Bob.”

“And you think runnin’ away when the going gets tough is gonna change things?” There’s a bit of a sarcastic bite to Bobby’s voice still, but all the real malice has been replaced with something weary and—John would say sympathetic if he didn’t know Bobby better than that. The man hasn’t felt an ounce of pity for John in his life, and it’s not like John’s going to ask for it.

“No. But if I can just—if I can bring home a win for them…”

“Boy, you’ve been sayin’ that for every one of the eleven years I’ve known you,” says Bobby, but not unkindly.

“I ain’t your boy.”

With a little sigh, Bobby muses, “No, I never could rein you in, not even when I was half out of my mind worried for you.”

John gives a little half-smirk at the thought of Bobby actually worrying about _him_ , of all people. “It’s not going to be like Nevada, I promise you. One hunt—just one—and then I’ll come straight back to them.”

“Oh, you will, will you?”

He rolls his eyes. “Piss off with that, Bobby, I mean it,” he says, but his heart’s not really in it. “I’ll pay their room for them in advance. Hell, I’ll stock the kitchenette for them up front and still give them all I’ve got right now in cash. They might not even need a motel—I was thinking I might call up Jim Murphy…”

Bobby’s shaking his head and laughing to himself, but still, the way he’s going about it doesn’t seem mean. “Are you really so proud you can’t just ask me?”

“Ask you what?” But Bobby just smiles weirdly at him until John finally adds, “Will you watch my boys for me?”

“Yeah,” he says simply, and John feels some of the tension starting to bleed out of his shoulders. “Was that really so hard?”

He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, ultimately pushing off from the doorway and parking himself in an armchair near Bobby’s. “I’ll call them every day I’m gone,” he vows, but Bobby just snorts and slurps up another mouthful of takeout.


	3. Chapter 3

“He hates us.”

“Dad doesn’t hate us, Sammy.”

“He hates us!”

“No, he _doesn’t_.” Dean’s aiming for a confident and soothing tone, but he’s got no idea whether or not he really sounds as adult as he hopes.

Sam’s not giving off any helpful cues, either, huffing dramatically and throwing up the hand that’s not holding Dean’s to cover his eyes. “But he saw,” he insists, and Dean knows what he means even as he nestles closer into his brother—nosing into Sam’s neck, one arm draped in front of his tummy, the other twisted uncomfortably under Sam’s weight, hands entwined. “You know how weird Dad is about anything he says is kid stuff. He wouldn’t look me in the eye _once_ through, like, six hours of training drills.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean he _hates_ us, buddy.”

“So then he’s mad at us: what’s the difference? It’s still going to end in more yelling, and drinking, and—oh, god, he’s gonna tell us we’re too old to share a bed anymore, and then what are we supposed to do? I can’t—I can’t—”

“If Dad were going to separate us, he’d have done so already today.”

Sam wriggles around in Dean’s arms. “I can’t do this by myself right now,” he whispers, and Dean understands him to be talking about the nightmares, but also about much more than the nightmares.

“Then you’re in luck, kid, ‘cause you’re stuck with me as long as I have anything to say about it,” says Dean, and he mercilessly tickles Sam’s belly and burrows his face deeper into the kid’s neck. Sammy squirms and laughs and protests while Dean curls his lips over his teeth and clamps down in a flurry around the exposed skin of Sam’s neck, making the most obnoxious _om nom nom_ noises he can muster.

He flicks his tongue playfully when he bites on Sam’s earlobe, and suddenly Sam isn’t laughing anymore.

“Shit. Sorry. I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry,” Dean hastens to say. He starts to unwrap his arms from around his brother’s waist, but then Sam lets out a pitiful whine, and Dean…

“It’s not nice to tease,” says Sammy in a strangled sort of voice.

“I wasn’t trying to,” he says again, and Sam heaves a big old sigh.

“I know.”

A few terse minutes pass as Sam’s breathing grows ragged and Dean struggles to hold himself absolutely still. Three hours ago, it would’ve made Dean crazy to know that Sam—that just a few short inches from Dean’s hands—“I’m sorry,” Sam is saying now. “I know I’m a freak. Let me up and I’ll take care of it.”

“You’re not a freak,” Dean says automatically.

“Oh, yeah?” Sam jerks hard until he’s twisted around so they’re lying face to face on their sides, the hard point of his dick jabbing into Dean’s thigh.

He breathes out hard—grips Sam by the biceps and pulls him away when Sam tries to grind down. “I said no, Sammy.”

Blushing, Sam squirms in his grip again, this time wriggling back away from him. Dean holds him tight where he is. “Let go of me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Leave me the fuck alone!”

“Don’t say ‘fuck’—”

“Fucking Christ, Dean, if you tell me to stop swearing _one_ more time, you big freaking hypocr—”

The dam bursts, then, and Sam breaks off into a sudden onslaught of tears. Dean wraps Sammy back up into himself, both of them ignoring the line of Sam’s erection where it’s crushed up against Dean’s leg again. Sammy shakes and wails and stifles the noise as best as he can into Dean’s shirt, and Dean rubs his back and kisses his temple and shushes him gently. “You’re not a freak, and I’m not leaving you,” he rambles. “I will _never_ leave you no matter how bad things get or what you try and do to me. You’re gonna be just fine, Sammy, you just gotta get through this next part here, okay? This is just the hard part, right now, and I’m so sorry, but I can’t let you try and hurt yourself again. I won’t. I just need you to breathe for me, okay, kiddo? Can you do that for me? Deep breath in… yeah, that’s it, you’re doin’ so good…”

“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, please don’t hate me, please don’t, please—”

“Never,” says Dean.

Sammy emerges from where he’d buried his face in Dean’s chest, snotty and shuddering and red from his eyes to his flushed cheeks. “I don’t understand. I’m pa-pa _the_ tic. I’m not—I’m not _clean_ , Dean, I don’t get it, why don’t you—?”

“Hey. You’re my bitchy kid brother, and there’s nothing wrong with you.” Sam scoffs, turning his face away. “No, I mean—there ain’t nothin’ you’re going through that makes you worth any less than—than everything.”

Sam scrubs at his face with the crook of his elbow, but as far as Dean can tell, he only succeeds in smearing the wetness around his cheeks. “That’s not fair. You can’t just say stuff like this and expect me not to…”

He wishes he could tell Sam that the kid isn’t the only one who feels these things that aren’t— _allowed_ , if only so Sammy would feel less alone in it, but if Sam knew—Sam can’t know. He already suspects too much. “We’ve already established that nothing’s gonna scare me away. It’s okay to want things, Sammy. We just… I just can’t.”

Sam stares at him with bloodshot, narrowed eyes for a long moment, and then he leans in and lands a messy kiss right on Dean’s mouth. He doesn’t push Sam away, but he doesn’t kiss back, either, pouring all his willpower into lying there motionless while Sammy licks and sucks and nips at both of his lips, until finally Sam tries to rip himself out of Dean’s grasp again, kicking as violently as he can.

“I can’t let you go. I’m sorry. You’re just gonna cut yourself again if you’re alone right now,” Dean says, but he doesn’t feel any less guilty hearing the words aloud. “Please go to sleep, Sammy, _please_. You’ll feel better when you’ve gotten some rest. I love you. I love you…”

Sam thrashes around for a long time before he wears himself out, burrowing back into Dean’s body and finally crying himself to sleep. Dean allows himself a few shuddering breaths while he manhandles Sammy onto his back and peels down his sweat-stained briefs.

He caught a few looks earlier tonight at the neat row of shallow razor marks marring the inside of Sam’s left thigh, but Dean still cringes at it now, the thick-clotting blood so starkly out-of-place against the perfectly smooth, creamy skin surrounding it. Dean can still remember the way his baby brother would laugh and laugh when Mom blew raspberries into those chubby thighs, how Dean himself would do the same after she was gone whenever he needed to raise Sammy’s spirits.

The cuts there are so fucking ugly, but it’s the perfect place to hide them, really—on the skin that his pants and underwear both keep tucked away from prying eyes, even Bobby’s and their dad’s. Clearly, however, Sammy didn’t bank on the fanatical extent of Dean’s attentiveness when he started making marks he thought he could hide from _everyone_.

Pulling Sammy’s briefs back into place, Dean gives his brother a fleeting kiss on his face, right on top of that infuriating mole right beside his nose that Dean always wants to rub off or something, and then strips off his T-shirt so that when he drapes himself on top of Sammy, they’re skin-to-skin. He may have failed to protect Sam from _Sam_ tonight, but he protected him from Dean—from the things Dean can’t do, because Sammy is thirteen and his _brother_ and recovering from trauma that no thirteen-year-old should know. It’s not enough, but he’s going to have to make it be enough, because Dean can’t afford to break down anymore—not when Sam already has.

They both sleep pretty badly, as far as Dean can tell, but when Sammy finally blinks awake for real the following morning, he seems calmer—like the sleep hit some kind of reset button in his brain or something to break the feedback loop of hysteria. His hands come up to skim hesitantly along the sides of Dean’s bare waist. “Dean… you awake?”

“Yeah,” he grunts. He plops both of his hands onto Sam’s cheeks and smacks a noisy kiss on Sammy’s forehead. “Feels better now, huh?”

“Kinda.” Dean knows the feeling: just because you’ve wound down enough to get a grip on yourself doesn’t mean everything’s suddenly fine. He himself still feels raw and scared and nervous. Haltingly, Sammy continues, “Listen, uh, thanks for…”

“Don’t mention it,” Dean dismisses, but Sam frowns and says—

“I’m being serious. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. If I were you, I’d have skipped out on myself months ago.”

“You’re just having a hard time right now. I’m not gonna _leave_ you over that, Sammy; do we really have to go through this again?”

“No,” says Sammy. “Maybe. Just… thanks for, um, you know, stopping me. You were right, and I kind of—attacked you for a while there. You shouldn’t have to, but… thanks.”

Dean tucks his face into Sam’s shoulder. “You ain’t got nothing you need to be embarrassed about,” he says. It would hardly be fair to chew Sam out for pushing Dean’s boundaries when Dean himself is full of mixed signals that Sammy’s probably picking up on or something.

Just before he’s going to roll off of Sammy and start thinking about getting out of bed, he hears Sam mumble, “I’m glad we didn’t do anything. I’m really, really sorry, Dean.”

God help him, but he just wants to kiss the guilt right out of Sam’s mouth, keep going until he devours him and licks away the last traces of anything that’s ever made Sammy hurt. He wants to be _inside_ of Sam, see the look in his eyes when he gets his dick into his body like he would if Sam were a girl—Dean thinks even then he wouldn’t be satisfied; Sam still wouldn’t be close enough. He exhales, very slowly. “Don’t be sorry.”

It physically hurts to pull away from Sammy and out of bed, but Sam helps a little by doing up all the buttons on Dean’s flannel for him and knocking elbows with him over the sink while they’re brushing their teeth. Sam gets an anxious little set to his jaw when they clamber down the stairs and into the kitchen for breakfast.

Bobby’s not around downstairs—probably working in the yard again, Dean would guess—but Dad is sitting at the table stabbing brutally at a plate full of pancakes with an offended sort of look on his face. “You cooked?”

“There’s more warming in the oven if you boys are hungry.”

Sammy frowns at him, but Dean just shrugs and rifles for plates in Bobby’s cabinets. Dad may be acting bizarre the last couple days, but Dean isn’t about to turn down home cooking.

Bobby hasn’t got any syrup, so he fishes butter and jam out of the fridge while Dad clears his throat and adds, “I was thinkin’ we could all three of us go down into the city today. Catch a matinee? Get lunch? Maybe show Sammy here how to shoot some real pool.”

“I _hate_ hustling,” Sam sulks, but Dean ignores him entirely and just asks, “Instead of training?”

“No training today. You can start again tomorrow,” says Dad, and then he takes an uncomfortably long pull from his glass of juice from concentrate.

On the one hand, weekends are easier than weekdays in that his proximity to Sammy helps dull the roaring anxiety that’s pretty much a fixture in Dean’s mind these days. On the other, however, that same proximity to Sammy means needing to constantly check his impulses and war with the temptation to reach out and touch, especially if Dad or Bobby is around. Dean winds up sitting in the middle when they get to the movie theatre, and it’s all he can do to sit on his hands and stop himself from grabbing onto Sam’s or, worse, pulling Sam in by his shoulders to cuddle up.

 _Vegas Vacation_ turns out to be one of Dean’s slightly less favorite _National Lampoon_ films: family-friendlier than he’d prefer, though still funny enough to split his sides throughout most of it. The chick playing Chevy Chase’s daughter is pleasantly, distractingly beautiful, and it helps to think about her ass every time Dean starts wanting to hold Sammy’s hand, like a total nerd, right there next to their dad. The low buzz of his standard guilt rises in volume for a few minutes when Cousin Vicki starts pole-dancing and Chase makes a half-assed crack to his son about incest. _Don’t think unnatural thoughts about your brother, Dean._

He gives in near the very end of the movie, when the old dude starts losing consciousness because he’s so frigging stoked about winning the game of Keno or whatever, and Dean strategically positions his empty popcorn bucket to block Dad’s hypothetical view so that he can reach over and take Sam’s hand. He has to fumble around in Sam’s lap for a little to find it, and he can feel Sammy’s eyes on him even though the kid doesn’t really turn his head at all, but Dean just squeezes and stares with determination at the screen. His own hand is a sweaty mess, and he finds it both validating and stressful that Sam’s is just as bad. When he rubs slippery circles with his thumb into the soft space between Sam’s thumb and index finger, he hears Sam’s breath hitch, just a little.

Dad chuckles and whistles at the first onscreen display of the cars the son wins on the slot machines—a Hummer and a Mustang among them—and then he leans in and tells Dean over the hooting coming from the audience, “But they ain’t got nothing on _our_ baby, am I right?”

“Right, sir,” Dean replies, hating himself. He thinks Dad gives him another one of those looks like he’s somehow answered wrong, but it’s too dark in the theatre to really tell for sure.

Since they’d had breakfast hardly two hours ago, Dean’s not _really_ hungry for lunch yet, but he’s not exactly going to pass up the free food when Dad wants to take them all out. They hit up a burger joint where they order at the counter and then go to wait in a booth along the far wall, Sammy crowding in next to Dean and immediately planting his weak hand on Dean’s thigh.

Dean sucks in tight, controlled breaths and barely listens to a word Dad says for the whole eight minutes it takes the clerk behind the counter to yell, “Order for Singer!” When Dad ducks out to grab their trays, Dean tilts his head inward a little and says, low, “Thought you were worried about Dad finding out.”

“Finding out what?” says Sammy in his best kid-innocent voice. Dean fumes and doesn’t answer, but Sam at least scoots a few inches further down the booth and shifts his hand down to Dean’s knee.

His burger—medium-rare, extra everything—goes down easier than he expects, and Sammy waits till it’s gone before giving him an appraising sort of nod and accepting Dean’s wordless offer to share his fries. Dad keeps interrupting the awkward silences by sort of grunting and then clearing his throat and asking cursory questions that net him cursory answers.

“How’s things at school?”

“You like that old Chrysler Bobby’s got you driving?”

“How ‘bout any girls? Yeah?”

Sam keeps rolling his eyes, and Dean thinks that maybe Dad just hasn’t noticed it—it wouldn’t be the first time—but then Dad tosses out the name of the bar where he’s thinking of taking them next, and Sam scoffs, “No.”

“ _Excuse_ me?” says Dad slowly. Honestly, Dean’s surprised he’s indulging Sam’s oncoming tantrum at all—that Dad didn’t just bark at him about following orders.

“Has it ever occurred to you that the local watering hole isn’t an age-appropriate place to take your thirteen-year-old kid? I can’t drink—”

“Hey, come on, Sammy,” Dean tries to placate him, but Sam steamrolls right past him without pausing.

“—And the darts and the pool and the-the-the jukeboxes, they’re all… We have money, we’re not on a hunt: why do you even care? I’d rather be training for your insane suicide vendetta than be—”

Quietly, his voice shaking, Dad says, “Your training is designed to keep you _alive_.”

“Not if the only things putting us in danger are things _you_ expose us to!”

Dad looks very resentful about Sam having picked the fight in a public place where he can’t backhand him across the face and shout about Sammy’s insolence. He restrains himself, his face hardening into something more nuanced than his usual short-temperedness. Dean glances to his side when Sammy abruptly retracts his hand from Dean’s knee.

“You ignorant child,” Dad hisses. “Get in the car.”

“I’ll walk,” Sam snarls.

“Car, _now_.”

They stare off for a long few moments while Dean’s heart throbs out of his ribcage, his limbs and back all stiffening with the buzz of tension, breaths coming shallowly again. He’s relieved when Sam huffs, thrusts his tray away and toward Dad’s bench, and shoves out of the booth to storm into the parking lot.

Dad takes a harsh breath in and out through his nose. “Bus the table and meet by the car, Dean.”

He obeys, hands flying over the trays to get outside and in between his dad and his brother as fast as humanly possible. But when Dean gets out to the Impala and squeezes into the backseat, Sam and Dad are just sitting in tense silence waiting for him, and Dad starts the car wordlessly.

It’s not until they’re pushing north on Cliff Avenue that Dean realizes Dad’s taking them back to Bobby’s like Sam asked. It startles him at first, and then his shock starts tipping over into dread when Dad parks the car in the lot but doesn’t get out after he’s cut the engine.

Dad says gruffly, “There’s four dead in Circle, Montana.”

Sam’s face twists all up into anguish. “I knew it. I _knew_ it.”

“You two are stayin’ here while I take care of this. It’s only a nine-, maybe ten-hour drive away. I’ll be checking up on you boys every— _Sammy_!”

“It’s okay, sir, I’ll go after him,” Dean says quickly, and then he’s slamming open the car door and pounding his feet up the porch, into the house, up the stairs—

Sammy isn’t in the guestroom, and Dean’s pulse accelerates while he dashes to the bathroom. It’s locked. “It’s me, buddy, let me in.”

“Jeez, Dean, I’m trying to take a shower!”

“Bobby’s gonna be pissed if you make me break down this door.”

“I’m not _making_ you do anything,” Sam grumbles, but a second later, Dean’s rewarded by a click of the lock.

He pushes into the tiny, tiled room and takes inventory of Sammy, who seems physically unharmed, glaring at Dean with a challenge in his eyes and all three shirts he’d been wearing today littered across the floor. Dean nods and then turns to root around by the counter, banging around in the medicine cabinet.

“Happy now?” Sam sulks. Dean steps back with a trio of razors clutched in his shaking fist, and Sammy goes pale. “Dean…”

“I can’t let you,” he says, and then after a pause he adds, “I’ll be right outside the door, okay?”

Leaving the door cracked open, he pretty much collapses down the wall just beside it and winds up huddled with his elbows on his knees and his head pressed forward, panting like he’s midway through a hunt. He hears Sam crank on the shower and tries to just—breathe, crowd everything else out of his body, but Sammy could try to crack his head open in there or something even with the razors all gone, and Dean can’t—he can’t—

It’s hard to hear Sam’s snuffling over the thrum of water from the showerhead, but Dean would recognize it anywhere. “Hey, I’m coming in,” he says gently, and then he sidles back into the room and locks the door behind him.

Sam’s sitting in a tight ball at the far end of the bathtub with the water stream skimming his feet. He knocks his knees open a little to reveal an array of lightly bleeding crescent moons on his thigh below the razor marks from yesterday. Dean glances from Sam’s thigh to his fingernails and back again. “Sammy, what the fuck did you…?”

“It was supposed to help. Why isn’t anything helping?” Sam whines, and he—

“Hey, no no no, it’s okay, you’re not in any trouble. I think Dad’s gone, okay, I didn’t hear him come in, just—you can cry, buddy, it’s all right.”

They end up crouched together in the tub with Sam tucked inside Dean’s arms and bawling into his shoulder, his clothes steadily soaking all the way through. He rubs Sam’s back, skimming his fingers over the knobby spine. “I knew it,” Sam says again, finally. “He _saw_ , and now he hates us.”

“He doesn’t…” Dean breaks off with a sigh. “It’s never going to be as bad as Nevada again, okay? We’re staying here, remember?”

“But what about the next hunt? Or the one after that? He won’t let us stay with Bobby forever, Dean; they can’t stand each other.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think they like each other more than they’re willing to admit.”

Sam swings his legs around to climb up onto Dean’s lap, facing him. Tears are still leaking out of his eyes, but he’s got a handle on the wailing by now. “That can’t be comfortable,” he mutters, plucking at Dean’s drenched flannel.

“It’s not. Help me out of some of this,” says Dean, smiling faintly.

Sam’s hands are shaking again as he seizes the flannel near the neckline and peels it down Dean’s arms. When Dean shucks it off, Sammy’s fingers go to his jeans. He fingers the button with an uncertain look at first, but when Dean doesn’t chastise him, he pulls open the fly and raises himself up a bit so that Dean can wriggle free. He plies off his T-shirt and kicks the whole mess toward the drain at the other end of the tub, keeping his boxers as a buffer between himself and Sam.

“Let me see these,” he murmurs, and Sam colors pink but obliges when Dean presses Sam’s knees further apart and smoothes a hand over Sam’s thigh to frame the cuts between his thumb and forefinger. “God, Sammy, you were _pinching_ yourself?”

Sam doesn’t answer. Fleetingly, Dean wonders if Sam would stop fucking hurting himself if Dean stopped—stopped giving him attention for doing it, but he shoves the thought firmly away. Sammy always has his undivided attention these days, not just when he’s like this.

Slowly, Sam rolls his eyes from the wet cling of Dean’s boxers up his abdomen to his mouth, and Dean is suddenly, acutely aware of Sammy’s total nakedness. “Let’s get you dried off and into some warm clothes, huh?” he says in a falsely cheerful voice.

He lifts Sammy gently off of himself and stumbles over to the faucet to cut the water supply. When he turns back around, Sam’s staring up at him from the floor of the tub with wide eyes.

“Okay, buddy, let’s go,” says Dean, and he hoists Sam up by the armpits and helps him stagger past the shower curtain. Sammy slumps against him while Dean fumbles to grab their towels from where they’re hanging on the hook on the door, shucking Sam’s down his body and tucking it around his waist before giving himself the same treatment.

“Sorry,” Sam mutters, but he doesn’t make a move to help, either.

“No big deal, kiddo. C’mon, let’s go get you some clean clothes, huh?”

Dean’s not exactly sure when Sam shifted from hysterical into quasi-catatonic, and he can’t decide which of the two frightens him more. When he realizes that Sam has lost the presence of mind to move on his own, Dean coaxes him up into his arms and carries him down the hall to the guestroom, Sammy’s head cradled in one of Dean’s elbows and his calves dangling over Dean’s other arm. “Getting fuckin’ big, kid,” he says, and he means it: he still remembers how breakable Sam felt when he used to hold him in his lap as a baby, when he’d spread Sam out on the floor to change his diapers.

It wasn’t like—people like Bobby and Pastor Jim always get pissed at Dad for leaving them alone when they were kids, but it’s not like Dean was _little_ at the time: Dad or someone else was always around until Dean was at least eight or nine. He and his brother weren’t ever alone together when Sammy was just a baby or anything. Dad was just…

Honestly, the way Sam is acting right now reminds Dean a lot of how their dad was for the first few months after Mom died. It’s all foggy now in Dean’s memory, but he remembers a blur of Good Days when Dad was basically normal, singing to them and bathing them and cooking their favorite foods with kind of this sad smile on his face all the time, and then another blur of Bad Days when Dad would just curl up in bed and stare straight through Dean like he was glass if he tried asking him for dinner or telling him Sammy was crying. He kind of remembers the uncertainty of never knowing which Dad he was going to get from one day to the next, and eventually he started asking Dad to teach him things when it was a Good Day—how to make PBJ and mac and cheese, how to draw up a bottle of formula, how to change a diaper—so that he’d know how to do it on Bad Days. It was just easier to do most stuff himself than to wait for Dad to get up and do it for them.

Sam’s always yelling about how Dad should take better care of them, and Dean knows he’s not _wrong_ , but—Sammy doesn’t remember what it was like. Hunting gave Dad a way to get out of bed every morning when he couldn’t before; when Dad is out working a case, at least Dean _knows_ that they’re on their own on those days and that Dad will hook them up with a motel room and enough money to manage. Dad fucked up in Nevada, and Dean still doesn’t know how he feels about that, but—he never wants to see his dad the way he was before they left Lawrence, and he doesn’t want Sammy to have to see it, either.

Sometimes when they were little he’d resent the fact that he’d had to take care of Sammy, but Dean never even really saw it as something he was forced to do by circumstance, but as something within his power that he chose to do to make things better. He hadn’t really understood what had happened to Mom at first, but he knew that they used to be happy and together and that now they weren’t—that nothing he did ever fixed Dad, but that it was actually pretty easy to get Sammy to stop crying and start laughing, if you knew what you needed to do. He was proud that he could do that, because Sammy was too little—Sammy couldn’t remember—Sammy still knew _how_ to be happy, so it didn’t matter if Dean was damaged, because Sammy still had a chance.

That’s what Dean’s always believed, anyway. So to see Sam now, limp and naked and bleeding while Dean wrestles his feet through a clean pair of briefs, is…

“Sammy, please,” he whispers, horrified to find his throat rough with tears. “I can’t do this without you. Hell, I don’t want to.”

Sam blinks at him and doesn’t hitch up his hips when Dean tries to pull the briefs over them. He smoothes his hands over the waistband and swallows thickly. “Are you with me, Sammy?” Knowing Sam will tease him about it even though he’ll like it, Dean fetches one of his own Henleys and starts wresting it over Sam’s bony arms, but Sam doesn’t make fun of him for it—Sam doesn’t say anything at all.

Trading his own boxers for a dry pair and throwing on a T-shirt, Dean climbs up onto the mattress to curl in next to Sammy. He listens to Sam’s breathing and doesn’t notice that he himself is crying until sobs are wracking his body and Sam is—is _responding_ , clutching Dean around the shoulders and planting kisses on his forehead. “I’m sorry, Dean, I’m sorry, it’s okay—”

“Sam?”

“Hi.”

Sam’s smiling a little, stroking his shoulder blades with unsteady fingers, and Dean remembers what he’d told him about feeling better when he can take care of Dean a little. He curls one palm around one of Sam’s cheeks, but then they both sort of jump when they hear the back door downstairs clang and a heavy pair of footsteps thundering inside.

“It’s okay. Hang on,” says Dean, and he leaps up and dashes to the window. The Impala is gone from its spot outside the front of the house, and Dean wonders briefly how he missed the sound of Dad driving away before realizing he couldn’t hear much over the water when he and Sam were in the shower. Bouncing back onto the bed, he tells Sam, “Car’s gone. It must just be Bobby downstairs.”

Sam’s muscles all loosen up. “Lie down with me.”

They get situated on their sides and over the blankets, Sammy’s arms around Dean’s neck, Dean’s hands cupping Sam’s face. It feels good—fucking fantastic, actually—but the sunken pit in the base of his stomach gapes wider. “So what do you want to do for the rest of today?”

Frowning, Sammy says, “I wanna be here with you.”

“Yeah, but it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. What about dinner with Bobby? Or—is there anything you wanted to do this weekend before you go back to school tomorrow?”

Sam gives him a hard look for a moment, and then his fists clench around the neckline of Dean’s Henley and he starts to pull it up and off. Dean releases Sam’s cheeks and his hands fly to Sam’s, stopping them. “Sammy, no. Not like this.”

“But we were _just_ naked—”

“And you _just_ told me this morning that you’re glad I stopped you!”

“Well, now I’m not anymore!” Sam wheedles. “This morning, I didn’t feel like this—”

“Like what? I’m serious, Sammy. Help me understand.”

Finally, Sam whispers, “Dirty. I feel dirty,” and he screws up his face again, and—

It’s almost a relief when Sam starts melting down again—the clench of Dean’s gut relaxes even as needles prick down his spine—because at least he doesn’t have to keep waiting for it, to try to keep Sam steady when he knows he’ll just topple overboard in a day or an hour or a second. Sammy turns to face the other way, bucking Dean off when he tries to curl up along Sam’s back, and so it takes a minute for Dean to really comprehend Sam’s little hiss of pain, the somehow looser quality of his cries, before—

Dean flies up and gets Sammy pinned to the bed beneath him in an instant, clenching both of Sam’s wrists in one fist above the kid’s head, Dean’s other hand at his solar plexus, the full weight of his lower body crushing against Sammy’s. One of Sammy’s wrists is bleeding. He whimpers.

“What the _hell_ ,” says Dean shallowly, “do I have to do to get you to take care of yourself?”

Sam snarls in his face, feral, still thrashing around for the upper hand, but it’s no good: Dean’s been eating more-or-less consistently for the last month, and he digs into Sammy with the full advantage of a four-year age difference and fifty extra pounds. He’s got Sam under control physically, but _mentally_ , Sam is… and Dean doesn’t know how to get through to him. He really, really doesn’t know how to get Sammy through the next half-day before he wears out and goes to sleep, and he allows himself a few bright moments of blinding panic, of helplessness, before he accepts that this is _too big_ for him and he—

—shouts, at the top of his voice, “Bobby?” The top of Dean’s voice right now is clogged and muffled by the lump in his throat, and he clears it before trying again. “Bobby, can you come up here?”

Sam’s whole face has gone wide and afraid, and he kicks harder, but Dean hangs on, all his muscles taut and thrumming. At first, Bobby’s response is incoherent—too quiet—but as his boots clatter up the stairs from the library, Dean can hear him grousing, “…Better be too damn important to come down and fetch me yourselves—”

The door swings open, but Dean doesn’t want to take his eyes off of Sammy. “Little help here, Bobby?”

“What in the hell?”

“He was hurting himself. Just—I don’t know how much longer I can hold him.”

Bobby apparently snaps out of whatever stupor he’d been in, because he hurries around to the side of the bed and stares at Sam with pursed lips. “ _Hurting_ yourself, Sam? What’d you do to yourself, idjit?”

“He was pinching himself. He broke the _skin_. And earlier—”

“Did I ask you to answer for him?” says Bobby sharply. “Let him up.”

“But—”

“I _said_ , let him _up_ , boy.”

Dean eases up the pressure against Sam’s body, and the kid scurries out from under him and bolts from the room. He starts to exclaim, “Now look what—”

“He’ll come back,” says Bobby airily.

“But he’s gonna hurt himself, and—”

“Like that’s any different from when your daddy looks for God at the bottom of a bottle? Or when _you_ show up here eatin’ less than a bird after you’ve been on your own for too long?”

“You know about—?”

“Yeah, I know about that. You damn kids always think you can hide everything, but people notice, Dean. People _worry_. Goddammit, people care about you! I love you like my—like you’re my own _child_ , and when I don’t hear from the three of you…”

Dean swallows and tries to concentrate on slowing his own pulse. It doesn’t work. “How long have you know about the… about my…”

Bobby kind of _harrumphs_ and takes a seat next to Dean on the creaky mattress. “You’ve been eating funny for years. Had the biggest appetite I’d ever seen when you were just a kid, and then you started comin’ here like…”

“Why didn’t you _say_ anything?”

“Givin’ you a pile of shit for not eating food that ain’t there wouldn’t’ve fixed shit. Naw, I gave your daddy hell, but you didn’t need that. But Dean—” He waits until Dean pries his fingers away from his face before continuing. “Just because Sam can’t pass off the thing _he_ does for anything other’n what it is don’t mean you’re any better than him.”

“That I— _what_? I _never_ said—”

“No, but you act like it, holding him down like that as if you can force him not to make his own bad choices. You don’t have to _condone_ it, but you can’t control people, Dean.”

“Yes, you can! If Dad—”

“You _can’t_ , and that’s somethin’ your daddy would do well to wrap his brain around before he loses you both over it. Little kids don’t know it, but Sam’s getting to be old enough he’s figuring it out—that he don’t _have_ to obey. If you try and make him, he ain’t gonna listen to you anymore when you try to help him. It’s gotta be his own choice to take care of himself.”

Breaking eye contact, Dean whispers, “Not if he’s already dead.”

“What was that, boy?”

“ _I said not if he’s already dead_!”

“Who the hell said—” Bobby starts, but then he freezes mid-sentence. When Dean looks back up at him, he’s wearing a funny mixture of anger and dread on his face. “When? How?”

“He… pills. Not enough to hurt him; I… caught him while he was taking them. It’s been almost four months.”

“And how long exactly were you planning on waiting before you _told_ somebody, idjit?”

Dean yells, “I couldn’t tell! Dad would just punish us both. Anybody else would’ve… if people know how bad it is, they’ll take us away from him, and he can’t be alone. I can’t let that happen to him.”

Bobby sighs, slapping Dean lightly on the knee. “It ain’t _your_ job to take care of _him_.”

“You don’t get it. Nobody does.”

“You’re right; I don’t,” says Bobby, and he pats Dean’s leg a couple more times before letting go.


	4. Chapter 4

Sam comes back to the guestroom twenty minutes later looking mopey and guilty. Dean’s still sitting with his legs hanging over the edge of the bed, pointedly looking away from where Bobby is crouched next to the dresser with his back against the wall. “I’m in trouble, right?” Sam says uncertainly, looking like he’s scared to set foot out of the doorway and into the room.

“No,” says Bobby, groaning a little as he pushes himself to his feet and strides toward Sam. He claps a hand on Sammy’s back a few times and then holds the kid in front of himself to size him up or something, frowning. “But we’re gonna do things a bit differently around here from now on, understand? Come on, both of you.”

Dean wants nothing more than to get his arms around Sammy for the duration of this conversation, but Bobby shunts them all back downstairs and into the kitchen, where Dean and Sam sit side-by-side with their hands clasped together under the table. Bobby parks himself at the head of the table adjacent to Sammy and fixes them both with a glare. “I ain’t gonna baby you, Sam, but I want you and Dean to both hand over your guns. I’m lockin’ them all away while we deal with this—mine, too. You’ll stick to physical conditioning only if you continue your training.”

“If?”

“John’s left already for Montana. Tell me he at least said he was going off hunting?” Sam and Dean both nod thinly, Sammy’s lips pulling into a sneer. “Right. I’ll be lookin’ after you boys, so I’m training you my way, which is only if you want to. You tell me whenever you’re ready, all right?”

Dean nods again. “I’m ready. I want to,” he tells Bobby at the same moment as Sam says, “I don’t want to train.”

They look at each other, Sam’s shoulders stiffening and eyes narrowing while Dean’s gut floods with even more of the familiar tension. “We don’t have to…” Dean mumbles and then trails off. If he’s training with Bobby and Sammy isn’t, then who’s going to keep an eye on Sam during Dean’s sessions?

“Just—maybe not every day? Or for hours at a time?” Sam hedges.

Dean scrubs a hand down his face. “Yeah. Yeah, okay, we can do that.”

“Right. We’ll start tomorrow evening, then,” says Bobby. When Dean starts to speak, Bobby interrupts, “I’m not having you wake up at five o’clock in the morning like your damn fool father did just so you can train first thing. You’ll go to school, you’ll work on cars for pocket cash, and then you’ll both train before dinner. I want to see you boys keepin’ busy and active till it’s actually time for bed, you hear? That means not just holing up together in your bedroom crying and cutting up on your own skins.”

He directs a pointed look at Sam, who withers and looks down. “Okay. I just…”

“If that head of yours is occupied with something other than how bad you feel, it’ll be easier not to get yourself stuck all up in that,” says Bobby sagely. “And when you _do_ start feeling like your brain is gonna crawl out of your body, you tell us—both of us. It ain’t fair of either of you to expect Dean to do all of the child-rearing in your lives.”

With that, he sends them to go grab their guns, which he locks away along with all of his own in an enormous safe on the floor of his bedroom closet. Sammy is obviously not happy about having to stay downstairs instead of curling up in bed again with Dean, but for his part, Dean’s sort of relieved not to have to hide it anymore—well, not to have to hide _all_ of it, at least. He’s perfectly content to protect Sam’s privacy by hiding the fact that Sammy sold his body to make money for food back in Nevada, but he’s also grateful to now have an extra pair of eyes to watch over Sam for any… is _mood swings_ the appropriate term? It doesn’t seem strong enough to describe the episodes Sam has been going through.

They burn off tension in the salvage lot, Dean pounding at the body of his Fifth Avenue while Sammy takes a jog through the woods. By the time they head back inside, Bobby’s ordered pizza, and they eat efficiently at the kitchen table before retiring to the library for a while, Bobby raising his eyebrow but saying nothing when Sammy nestles in close to Dean on the couch and eventually lays his head in Dean’s lap to sleep.

Dean laughs at the television and skims a hand through Sam’s sweaty hair until he feels his own head starting to tip back against the back of the couch. He stirs a little when he feels a rough pair of hands moving him around, then relaxes when he realizes it’s just Bobby helping shift him so he’s lying fully on the couch, Sammy spread-eagled on top of him.

“Be safe, boys,” Bobby whispers, squeezing Dean’s shoulders with one arm for a moment, but by the time he wakes next, Dean has forgotten.

He keeps waking up convinced that Sammy is dead only to realize he’d been dreaming and find his brother whimpering and thrashing around on top of him on the couch. Around two in the morning, Dean decides he can’t take the tight quarters and body heat, and he stands with Sammy cradled in his arms and carries him upstairs into the bedroom. It would have been more convenient to leave Sam on the couch, he reflects as he tucks into the bed beside him, but Sam probably finds it as comforting as Dean does to wake up to his brother safe and sound right there, and Dean doesn’t want to subject Sam to the disorientation of finding Dean gone when, last he knew, they were together in the study.

He must fall asleep properly in the end, because one minute it’s pitch-black outside and he’s anxiously stroking his brother’s back, and the next he’s being shaken awake by a frantic Sammy in a sunny room—as sunny as winter days ever get in the overcast Midwest, anyway. “’S wrong, buddy?” Dean asks, blinking painfully.

“You have to get up, we’re _late_ , we must have forgotten to set the alarm—it’s almost ten o’clock! Please, Dean, get up, _wake up_ —”

Sam looks close to tears, and the idea that he’s _this_ upset over missing a couple of hours of school when they’re both used to playing hooky for days at a time would be laughable to Dean if he didn’t already know how easily the slightest mishap can set Sam off these days. “Hey. I’ll take care of it. I’m gonna go call your school; why don’t you…”

Dean’s leery of sending Sammy off to go shower after what happened in there yesterday, especially in light of Sam’s current mood, but Sam resolves his dilemma for him by saying, “I don’t have _time_ to shower. Can’t you call them in the car? We need to get dressed _right now_.”

“Sammy, slow down. We ain’t going anywhere until you look at me and take a breath, okay? You’re gonna run yourself into the ground going at this rate. Breathe in, come on, slowly… there you go.”

He manages to get Sam to sit there taking deep breaths while he flips open his cell phone and puts through a call to Whittier explaining away Sam’s tardiness. Only after he’s hung up with the receptionist and Sam’s breathing has evened out a little does Dean reluctantly peel his hand off Sammy’s back and twist himself out from underneath the blankets.

After dropping Sam off at Whittier, Dean momentarily considers whether to skip his own school day entirely, but an annoying voice in his head that sounds just like Sammy insists that he can’t afford to lose the time if he wants to get his diploma for his brother on schedule. When he parks outside Joe Foss and heads inside, he makes for the credit lab like usual, but the security guard in the front hall stops him and redirects him to the main office to sign himself in.

Dean flashes his best charming grin for the grandmotherly lady at the front desk when he first walks in. “Um, I’m a student in Mr. Harrington and Ms. Washington’s credit lab. The guy said I need to sign in with you since I was tardy today.”

“Oh, yes. Your name?”

“Dean Winchester.”

“Thank you so much, Mr. Winchester. Just give me a moment to pull you right up, and we’ll get you all taken care of.”

“Great.”

He watches the lady closely as she clicks her mouse a few times and her eyes scan slowly over Dean’s file or whatever on her computer screen. As she purses her lips and rereads whatever’s in there, Dean’s eyes flick down to the placard on her desk identifying her as BETHANY PRYOR – SECRETARY.

“Okay, Mr. Winchester, I’ve got you all signed in here, and I’ve noted your time of arrival. I do have a note here in our records that your guidance counselor would like to meet with you following any unexcused absence or tardy. Have you had the opportunity yet to meet Ms. Everett?”

“Couple times,” says Dean stiffly.

Pryor calls Everett on her little black desk phone while Dean lingers there on the other side of the desk, scuffing his threadbare shoes on the laminate floor of the office and picking at his jeans. When Everett finally pops out into the main office to greet Dean, she gives him a smile that’s as firm as her handshake and then beckons him back toward the little offices that branch off behind Pryor’s desk, snapping shut the door of Everett’s own behind them.

Dean avoids eye contact and messes with the hemline of his jacket sleeve while Ms. Everett hitches this little sigh. “Thank you for meeting me here today, Dean. Do you understand why you’re here this morning?”

“’Cause I was late,” says Dean as aggressively as he can muster.

“That’s partly true, yes, but the situation is more complex than that. To start with, you’re not in any kind of trouble,” she says evocatively.

He looks up. “I’m not?”

“Not at all. You’re eighteen years old—that makes you years older than the maximum age at which truancy would have legal ramifications for you or your guardians. Legally speaking, missing class is well within your rights. Of course, missing too _many_ classes will delay your academic progress as well as your timeline for graduation, and all of us here at Joe Foss—myself included—want to do everything we can to support you through your academic career to ensure that this doesn’t happen. It’s my understanding that most of the credits you’ve missed throughout your career have been due to truancy, which is why I wanted to talk with you today about how we can help you continue to be successful here with us.”

She smiles enticingly at him. Dean scowls. “I bet you say that same little speech to all the flunkies,” he sneers without thinking.

If anything, Everett’s smile only broadens. “Is that how you think that we think of you?” When Dean doesn’t answer, she goes on, “Too often, our education system… it tries to put students into boxes—to group them as ‘good’ or as ‘bad’—but at Joe Foss, we don’t believe in writing anyone off as lazy or disrespectful—or as a ‘flunky,’ as you put it. When I see you, Dean, I see an intelligent, witty, and resilient young man with an incredible work ethic and capacity for commitment.” She pauses again, maybe waiting for Dean to give her some nugget of wisdom he doesn’t have, and then Everett adds, “Is that what _you_ see? Or do you see something different?”

Dean rolls his eyes, feeling hot and strained inside of his skin. “Look, Ms. Everett, I ain’t… I ain’t nothing so dramatic as that, all right? My little bro wants to see me graduate, so I’m trying to do that. I forgot to set the alarm for school last night. It was my fault. Is that it?”

Ignoring his question entirely, she presses, “You’ve mentioned your brother before. He must be important to you.”

“Yeah, Sammy is… he’s the most important thing, you know? Him and Dad. But Sammy is the only good thing I’ve done, really.”

“That _you’ve_ done?” Everett leans in, her forehead crinkling in concentration. “That’s the kind of statement we usually hear coming from parents, not siblings.”

Whoops. Dean tries to focus on evening out his breathing, shoving down the hot flash and prickling he feels coming on. “We don’t… it’s just been us and Dad and Uncle Bobby since Mom died. Sammy and I got real close, that’s all. It ain’t always been easy, but we’re fine.”

“What hasn’t been easy?”

“Just—whatever, you know. Sammy gets sad sometimes, I guess.”

“Dean, can you tell me what happens when Sammy gets sad?”

He shrugs one shoulder and stares at this ugly-ass framed photograph of tortoiseshell kittens on the wall behind Ms. Everett. “I don’t know. But it’s not his fault. Of course he gets sad and can’t hold it together sometimes. Who wouldn’t, dealing with what he’s dealing with?”

“And you? Do you get sad?”

“No,” says Dean firmly. “Can’t. Who else is gonna—I gotta take care of Sammy.”

Everett sighs a little, folding her hands in front of herself on the desk. “I think that Sioux Falls Schools can help you _and_ your brother, Dean. You’re not in any trouble, I promise—”

“Sammy’s not, either, right? I told you, it ain’t his fault—”

“No, your brother isn’t in trouble, either. I’m going to contact his guidance counselor at Whittier—and your uncle as well—and reach out to both of them with my recommendations for how to support the both of you—”

“You can’t,” Dean blurts out. “We’re _fine_.”

Gently, she tells him, “Dean, I’m not asking for permission, although I _can_ guarantee that I will withhold the confidential details of our conversation from your uncle. However, I wanted you to hear this from me, instead of leaving you to find out from your family and… draw your own conclusions.”

He rolls his eyes again and keeps his lips shut tight.

“I’d like you to come back and see me again in the next couple of days—not as a punishment, just to chat some more about how you’re doing. Let’s meet… tomorrow at eleven o’clock?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Everett scribbles out an appointment card for him in loopy cursive lettering and then insists on shaking his hand again before he gets up to go to the credit lab. “I’ll see you at eleven A.M. tomorrow, Dean. Thank you for your time.”

For the rest of the school day, Dean can barely focus on the physics module he’s working on, totally distracted by the thought that Everett may _right now_ be on the phone with Sam’s school, with _Bobby_. As soon as the final bell rings to signal the end of class, Dean bolts out of lab and drives his Fifth Avenue in anxious little loops around downtown in the hour or so that pass before the middle school lets out for the day.

When he first climbs into the car, Sam seems terrified to touch Dean—to say anything at all to him besides a mumbled little _hi_ —but he snuggles in haltingly after Dean reaches out an arm to wrap around Sam’s shoulders. Back at the house, Bobby is shouting at somebody on the phone when they step inside, and Dean shoos Sam away with a quick, “Go outside and get started on your homework. We’ll meet you out there.”

Sam obediently takes his bookbag out to the salvage yard to study until Dean’s done with the cars—their usual routine—and Dean shifts his weight from one foot to the other until Bobby slams the phone back into its cradle with a handful of choice, disgusted swears. “Fool hunters thinkin’ they can take on trickster gods without backup,” he grumbles by way of greeting. “You ready to work? Everything go okay at school today?”

“Um,” says Dean, and Bobby frowns and looks him properly in the eye.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Sammy and I were late today. It was my fault—”

“You didn’t get to school on time? Couch was empty when I came downstairs this morning.”

“We moved up to the guestroom during the night. Anyway, I called Sammy in, but the guidance counselor wanted to talk to me when I came in, and she—they—well…”

Raising his eyebrows, Bobby prompts, “Spit it out, Dean, we ain’t got all day.”

“She says she’s going to call you—and Sammy’s counselor—about… stuff.”

“What kind of ‘stuff?’”

“I don’t know. She thinks we’re a dropout risk or something, I don’t know.”

Bobby breathes out in a rush and leans back against the kitchen counter, so Dean mimics him, leaning up on a spot next to Bobby’s and turning his head to look at him. Bobby says, “Boy, this _could_ be a good thing. Always knew you put too much strain on yourself taking care of your brother, but Sam… the way he was yesterday, I ain’t had any idea he was that bad. We can’t fix somethin’ like that. Maybe me and you can each help Sammy with a piece of it, and maybe those people up at the schools can help you boys with another piece of it, but—we gotta get our stories straight, Dean, before they lock us all up in the loony bin for believing in monsters.”

Dean stuffs his hands in his jacket pockets and tips his head back, closing his eyes against all of it. “You really think these people can help him?”

“I think it ain’t just Sam who could use helping,” says Bobby, and it’s not until later that Dean realizes Bobby never really answered his question.

-

At first, Sam feels relieved when he finally darts into the upstairs bathroom at ten o’clock that evening. It’s not that he isn’t grateful for Dean and Bobby’s company—and training with Bobby is certainly less stressful than training with Dad ever is—but it’s exhausting trying to hold himself together enough to get through homework and drills and dinner when everything inside of Sam feels… wobbly. Both of them, but especially Dean, keep eyeing Sam like they want proof that Sam’s all better now, and it makes him furious to feel like he’s not allowed to let them down even when he’s just— _not_ better. It feels like it’s getting worse, even, every day.

He’s only even been in there for all of three minutes, using the toilet and stripping off all his clothes, when there’s a soft tap on the door, just as he’s turning on the shower and testing the water (still freezing) with his hands. “I’m in here!” he calls out, his voice thick with irritation.

“Open up, kiddo.” It’s Dean, unsurprisingly, the words knotted with that anxious shade he always uses when he’s talking to Sam these days. Sam knows he’ll feel guilty about it later, but for now—god, he’s just so sick of being _babied_.

Though he considers whether to shout back for Dean to leave him alone and ignore Dean’s needling, he knows that he would just wind up crouched on the floor of the tub feeling tight and prickly until Dean inevitably picked the lock and let himself into the bathroom. Sam groans a little under his breath. Sometimes, he really freaking _hates_ his brother.

Not bothering to grab his towel—if Dean wants to invade his space, he can deal with Sam being naked—he shakes out his icy-wet hands over the tub and treks backward so he can unlock the door and pull it open with force. “What do you want?” he demands, even though Sam’s pretty sure he knows exactly what Dean wants.

Dean slinks into the bathroom and keeps his eyes averted from Sam’s body. “I just—I’ll be right here if you need anything, okay?”

Sam rolls his eyes and climbs directly into the shower, irrespective of the lukewarm water sluicing across his skin. He allows it to heat up to just beyond the point of comfort, pounding his back and pooling around the sensitive soles of his feet, distracting enough that he doesn’t have to _remember_ —

He jams a hand in his mouth, knowing he has to be quiet if he wants to be able to do this with Dean slouched by the sink just on the other side of the curtain. It annoys Sam to see Dean exert power over Sam over and over—fully dressed and stable and unsullied, constantly barging into Sam’s space to lord it over him as if Sam’s got no right to hate it—and yet, the thought that Dean wants to be here, with Sam totally exposed…

Could he get away with it? He drops a hand to his crotch, then turns his head to the side, peering at the shadows behind the shower curtain. It’s colored a solid, opaque blue, but the shade is light enough that he can make out the silhouette of Dean’s figure tipped against the porcelain sink.

Grunting in frustration, Sam rips his hand away and tries to focus on his fingers as he fumbles for the clean-smelling Dove soap he had Dean pick up for him when they got here last month. It’s not like there’s even any point in indulging himself: every time he tries, either his thoughts turn to Dean and he gets mad, or his thoughts turn to that _man_ and he gets—

No. Sam’s _not_ going to think about it. They have food and a house and a car here, and there’s no good reason for him to keep reliving what it was like not to have those things—what he did to try and get them.

He doesn’t want to call out for Dean, doesn’t want to give Dean that ammunition to use against him later, but—he drags his fingernails against his skin as he swipes the bar of soap up and down his left arm, then his right, but it’s no good: the sting of the scratches as the tracks on his arms turn white, then red, aren’t enough to pull him out of his own head. God, Sam doesn’t want to be weak in front of Dean—just wants to be _alone_ —but not if it means being alone with this feeling, and… “Dean?”

Sam can hear him shifting as his outline straightens up on the other side of the curtain. “Yeah, buddy.”

“Dean, please.”

There’s a pause, Sam’s heart hiccoughing up into his throat, and then he sees Dean’s figure starting to strip off his clothes. He’s ashamed, but the guilty feeling dissipates a little when Dean shoulders into the shower a minute later, warm and strong and swallowing Sam up into an embrace. He’s kept his boxers on again, and Sam resents the reminder that _Dean_ isn’t making himself vulnerable like he’s making Sam, but the hug feels so good that it’s easy for Sam to take his mind off of the imbalance, for now.

“I can’t do it,” he chokes out. “I can’t do it all day. I’m not brave like you want me to be.”

Dean shushes him and rocks them from side to side a little, rubbing a calloused hand over Sam’s back. “You ain’t gotta prove anything, Sammy, it’s okay. I got you.”

They stand like that for what feels like a long time, but probably isn’t: Sam’s got a way warped sense of time nowadays, drowning inside his own head for minutes that stretch out and last for hours. As if on cue, he wishes desperately that he could give back to Dean the things Dean does for him—to repay him, yes, but also to show on the outside the things trapped inside his head—but the only way Sam knows how to do that is with his body, and Dean’s made it overly clear that he doesn’t want that: not enough, anyway; not as much as Sam does. He considers pressing his luck—feels like he’ll fall down and _die_ if he keeps this cloistered in his head a moment longer—but Sam’s humiliated himself enough for one shower, and enough times in the past month alone of enduring Dean’s repeated rejection, that the shame of failing Dean _again_ is enough so he can control himself, this time.

Sleep is mercifully quick to come, considering how late Sam had overslept earlier. The following morning, he figures that Bobby’s training must have worn out his bones, even though Bobby’s a more sensible trainer than Dad is—Bobby had kept it under two hours, warm-ups and laps and a bit of sparring. Stretching his arms a little, he curls back into the space where Dean’s got Sam trapped between his strong arms and the warmth of his chest. Dean’s neither talking nor moving around, but his breathing is shallow in the way that must mean he’s already awake. The clock on the dresser is blinking out _06:02_ , and Sam wonders what woke him—the analog alarm clock on the nightstand, probably, which Dean must have turned off minutes ago.

“Morning,” he tells Dean.

“Hey.”

Dean’s voice sounds dark with sleep. Sam shivers.

If he took Dean at his word, Sam ought to feel guilty for the things he wants to do to Dean, but—he can’t. He never really was able to relate when his classmates started talking about sex and desire: he just knows that he wants to be as close to his brother as he can, that Dean is the only person Sam can imagine trusting enough to get near Sam like that. It’s worse now that someone else _has_ done those things to Sam, ruined him, because Dean _won’t touch_ him, even with this itching underneath his skin that Sam’s afraid will never ease up if he doesn’t scrub over it.

In the bathroom, Dean takes an absurd amount of care flossing between all of his teeth, so that when Sam’s ready to pee, his brother can waggle his eyebrows and wave his bottle of mouthwash at Sam with the hand that isn’t meticulously brushing his teeth. Sam makes a show of rolling his eyes and tries with limited success to ignore Dean and his smirk while he tugs down his pajama bottoms and whizzes into the basin.

After they’ve dressed, they find Bobby already in the kitchen munching grumpily on a stack of dry-looking toast. “Sit down a minute,” he rasps, and they join him at the table.

Dean is smirking. “I thought hunters were supposed to be able to get by on four hours of sleep a night no problem.”

“ _Gettin’ by_ ain’t exactly the ideal here, idjit. Now, listen here. I got word yesterday that your boys’ counselors up at school are gonna be calling you in soon to check in on how you’re doing, and while that—”

“Calling us in?” Sam’s mouth has gone all dry, and he can’t even hear the next words coming out of Bobby’s mouth as Dean reaches over to rub a steadying palm in circles over the top of Sam’s spine. He doesn’t have many feelings about guidance counselors one way or the other, but appointments with them will surely mean probing questions about how he’s doing in school, and _why_ he’s not doing _well enough_ in school, and what happened at home to _make_ him do so badly in school, and Sam—

The urge to bolt for the stairwell is strong, but Dean tightens his grip on the base of Sam’s neck as soon as Sam even tightens his muscles in preparation to stand. He stays where he is, trying to tune back into Bobby, who’s saying, “…why I didn’t mention this to your dad when he called over here yesterday. That fool couldn’t recognize anything good so long as it’s got another human being attached to the other end of it. I want you boys to feel safe tellin’ your counselors what’s been going on with you—and _don’t_ you try and look me in the face and tell me there ain’t nothing going on with you these days, I’ve seen enough to know—but there’s one thing I need you to understand.” He pauses, staring them both down with his best stern frown. “They can’t find out about hunting. You hear that? You _can’t_ tell _anybody_ monsters are real, or they’ll lock us all up in the loony bin so fast you’ll never see your daddy or each other ever again. You tell them that John’s a traveling salesman—self-employed, odd jobs—and that he ain’t tell you boys much about what he sells or where he gets his work, and I just got joint custody of you boys to give y’all some stability. Are we clear?”

Dean mumbles his assent, and Sam nods without meeting Bobby’s eyes, which apparently isn’t good enough to please him. He demands again, “I _said_ , are we clear?”

“Yes, sir,” they chorus.

“None of that ‘sir’ business, idjits, come on. You know how I don’t like that. Eat some damn toast; you’re both looking a little too pale for my liking.”

There’s a taut rubber band ball of nerves weighing down Sam’s gut for the whole school day, but the counseling office never calls him out of class. He can barely concentrate on any of his lectures or coursework—not even English—and while Sam feels a rush of relief at the end of the day, it’s mingled with a hefty feeling of guilt. If it’s going to happen eventually, he sort of wishes he could get the first appointment over with _now_ so that at least he won’t have to keep dreading it, and he feels weirdly responsible for that not happening today just because he’d been hoping it wouldn’t.

Dean, on the other hand, _did_ meet with his counselor today, and he tells Sam a little about it when they’re in the shower together that night. Dean doesn’t make a big deal out of getting in with Sam, just elbows into the bathroom right after him and starts talking about the transmission on his Fifth Avenue while he’s getting undressed, and it’s surprisingly nice to have some quiet time together to just _be_. Tipping his head back under the spray of water, Sam shivers pleasantly as Dean’s calloused fingertips work the shampoo out of Sam’s hair.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Dean assures him, now lathering his own head up while Sam scrubs himself down with soap. “I’ve talked to Everett before, and she’s all right, I guess. Total suburbanite, but she’s not really, like… _fake_ , exactly.”

“What’s wrong with suburbanites?”

“Dude, what’s _not_ wrong with suburbanites? They’re a bunch of entitled, exclusive bitches. I frickin’ hate rich people.”

“I don’t,” sighs Sam. He doesn’t really have much experience with rich people, but he’ll see them sometimes in places like Henderson back in Nevada, with their clean clothes and their carefree smiles, and wonder what he’d need to do to ever be good enough to have so few worries. Sam _hates_ being poor. He _hates_ what he let that man do to him, and there are days Sam would rather die than go on with the knowledge that all he has to look forward to for the rest of his sorry life are monsters and nightmares, not having enough to eat and or anybody to talk to.

He tried that, once, literally—but Dean put a stop to it. Dean always puts a stop to everything Sam wants that’s out of line with Dad’s rules, and yet Sam keeps going _back_ to him for everything, because nobody but Dean could ever really understand what their life feels like.


	5. Chapter 5

By the time Sam gets called down to the counseling office for his first appointment, it’s Thursday, and he’s just gotten back his latest geography test (B minus). He distantly recognizes his guidance counselor, Mrs. Platt—a plump redhead with freckles like Dean’s and a great big belly laugh—as the woman who gave Sam his class schedule and pointed him to his first period classroom on his first day back here last month. She tells him to take a seat in one of the cushy orange armchairs across from her desk and spends the first ten minutes of his appointment informing him that everything he tells her will be kept in confidence between herself and occasionally other teachers or counselors, unless he gives her reason to believe that he’s being abused or that he’s a danger to himself or others. So basically, Sam isn’t going to be able to tell her any actually relevant information about his life, which is at least nothing he isn’t already used to.

He’s been bracing himself for the last two days to dodge questions about his dad and Bobby and why he’s been to so many schools, but Mrs. Platt mostly just asks Sam about how he’s feeling. “Fine,” he says at first, and then eventually he surprises himself by adding, “Kind of lonely sometimes.”

“Most people do when they move to a new place,” says Mrs. Platt, nodding. “I know you’ve moved around a number of times already.”

“Yeah. I mean… I love my dad and my uncle. My brother is great, but—I think he wants me to grow up and turn out to be just like him and Dad, and I’m not—I’m not _one_ of them. I don’t like the stuff they like; I don’t think about stuff the way Dean does.”

“That sounds frustrating.”

“It’s _stifling_. I don’t fit in with them: I don’t fit in anywhere. And Dean’s always freaking out obsessing over how I’m doing, and it’s like I can’t get any space to just be _me_ and not have to prove that I’m like other people, but even when I’m alone, I still feel…”

Mrs. Platt’s lips twist sympathetically. “Lonely?”

“Yeah. And then I feel like a—a jerk, because he’s trying to help me, and it feels like I’m taking advantage of him when I let him because of how much we fight when I don’t want him to help me.”

She pauses, like she’s mulling over how she wants to say whatever crap she’s planning on handing him, but then she scribbles down a word or two in the notebook in front of her and says slowly, “You know, it’s easy for anyone to feel like the emotion they’re experiencing at one particular moment is—is all-consuming, like it _defines_ how they always feel and always _will_ feel, when really, how we feel can be a lot more transient than that, as a result of all sorts of instantaneous factors and environmental triggers. You’re not a hypocrite for feeling or wanting different things at different points in time, Sam—I promise you that. Have you tried explaining this pattern in how you feel to Dean?”

“Not… not really,” Sam figures. He thinks he’s sort of incoherently stumbled around it when talking to Dean before, but he’s never really been able to put any kind of articulate definition to the thing.

“I think you might feel better if you did. In fact, I think it could really help you out _and_ improve your relationship with Dean if you were to really think about what you want that relationship to look like when you feel to drawn to him, and also what you want it to look like when you’re feeling like you want some time to yourself, and then sit down with him and work out some ground rules to help you both navigate those situations moving forward. Who knows: maybe Dean feels just as conflicted sometimes and hasn’t known how to talk through what _he’s_ feeling, either.”

He doesn’t really know how to make the words come out right and explain it to Dean without making him worry even more, but the appointment with Mrs. Platt at least gives Sam a lot to think about for the rest of the day. He doesn’t say much when he’s slouched against the window of Dean’s Fifth Avenue after school, or while he’s sitting outside with his pre-algebra homework and Dean’s supplying a running commentary on the car he’s underneath today, or even when Bobby’s coaching them through sparring and Dean’s got him pinned with their breaths labored and Dean’s whole body a trembling tightrope against his—especially not then. It makes Sam feel underdeveloped—powerless—and his stomach lurches, and his pants squeeze tight around his groin.

It’s been maybe a week since Sam’s been able to masturbate, now that Dean won’t let him into the bathroom by himself, and he feels like he’s going to crack up any second under the strain. The stupid thing is, Sam doesn’t even _like_ taking care of business. He’s never exactly enjoyed it, the sensations themselves freak him out, and he’d just ignore it if not for the buildup of tension that only resolves itself after orgasms. But _now_ , every time he does all the tricks that used to net him a quick release—tries messing with the slit at the end of his penis, or digging his pointer finger up inside himself to rub steady circles on his prostate—Sam just thinks alternately about Dean, how much Dean would hate him if he knew, and Nevada (oh god, what he did in Nevada), and he ends up blowing his load all over the wall of the shower with a face full of snot to match. Like he’s exploding at both ends or something.

His agitation just builds and builds and builds and _builds_ through dinner, TV, Dad’s nightly phone call, Sam croaking out _yes sirs_ and _no sirs_ until he can scurry back into the library and hide his face in a couch cushion. Bobby tests him with an “Everything all right there, son?” that escalates into a “Sam, _talk_ to me,” but he won’t, praying that Bobby isn’t going to hate him for it, praying that they can stay with him.

Dean won’t let him into the bathroom alone. Of course he won’t. “Get _out_ ,” Sam tells him, but Dean takes off all his clothes and strong-arms Sam into a hug, rocking them together, apologizing. “Get the hell out. I gotta—I gotta—”

“You’re too young to be cussing, Sammy,” says his brother, and his voice sounds dangerously tight.

“Stop saying that.” Sam’s voice wavers; Bobby is _right downstairs_ , and they can’t—“I’m a—do you even get that? I’m a _whore_ , and if I’m old enough to be _fucking_ , then I’m old enough to be swearing—”

“Sammy, no, don’t _say_ that shit about yourself, please—”

“It’s true!”

“You’re not—”

“Stop lying to me! I _hate_ you. You’re a _bitch_ , you’re a bitch, you’re such a jerk, always hanging around making me need you and then not _letting me_ , like there’s something _wrong_ with me for it, and—”

“Nothing is wrong with you,” says Dean earnestly, gripping tighter, almost choking Sam.

“I said don’t lie to me—you don’t know how this feels!”

“Then show me.”

Sam tries to wriggle free, but Dean’s older than him and bigger than him and Sam hasn’t got any leverage. “I _hate_ my life. I hate it, and I don’t want it anymore, Dean, I don’t want to be _alive_ , not if I have to _feel_ these things, and I can’t make them stop—can you make it stop? Can you please make it stop? Can you help me, please? I _can’t_ , I don’t want to, I—”

He doesn’t recognize what he’s doing until Dean wrenches them apart—drags Sam away from where he’s rubbing himself up on Dean’s thigh like a _dog_ —and pins him to the wall. His head slams, it hurts, but Dean doesn’t look angry, just—scared, maybe. “You don’t need me, Sammy, not like that.”

“But I _do_. I can’t, Dean.”

“But if I do this… if I do this, it’ll hurt you later.” Dean’s eyes bore into his face, but Sam can hardly look back at him. Everything’s gone blurry.

“No, it won’t. I don’t care. It hurts _now_.”

Dean stares at him with shuttered eyes and open lips for a long, long moment, and then he gently eases Sam down from the wall and back onto Dean’s own body. “I… okay, Sammy. Okay. But you gotta be quiet, okay, Bobby’s downstairs—just let me turn the water on first, all right, please—”

As he talks, Dean tugs Sam’s limp limbs free of his shirts and jeans and briefs, crouching to peel off Sam’s socks and press one kiss each to the smelly, filthy soles of his feet. He looks up at Sam with an unreadable expression in his dark green eyes, and Sam chokes back the sound of even _more_ crying, god, what is wrong with him. It’s when Dean stands and turns on the shower that Sam pieces together what Dean’s letting happen, and his blood runs _hot_ , and bile bubbles up into his throat.

“Dean, no. You said… you didn’t want… no, I won’t make you, not _this_ , _no_ —”

Dean hums and shushes him and pulls them both into the tub, under the spray, running Sam’s stupid Dove soap all along his body gently, carefully. “I said okay. This ain’t you _making_ me, Sammy. Everything’s all right.”

“No, it’s not, don’t let me make you, don’t let me do _this_ to you, I don’t want you to hate me, no-no-no-no— _Dean_ —”

“I ain’t mad, and I ain’t gonna hate you. It’s okay, we’re okay, Sammy—my Sammy—just this once, all right? Please? Just… like this, here…”

Again, Dean crowds Sam up against the wall, but this time there’s water pounding in their eyes and Dean is folding his skin up against Sam’s skin, cupping Sam’s cheek in his hand and nudging a thigh in between both of Sam’s. “Like this,” he repeats, pulling at Sam’s hip, getting a rhythm going, and everything tingles and he thinks maybe this wouldn’t feel so bad every time if he could only feel safe, but he doesn’t, can’t, and—“Hey. Eyes up here. Look at me, Sammy.”

Sam looks and wails and shudders, hating himself, _hating_ himself for this. “This is okay? You don’t hate me?”

“Not ever, Sammy. It’s just you and me. Keep looking at me,” says Dean, and he bends down and slots his mouth against Sam’s, eyes still big and wide, sucking Sam’s lower lip between his teeth before he dips his tongue in to curl around Sam’s. He rocks Sam’s crotch along his leg like Sam is some kind of wild, awful animal, and Sam gives into it, frantic, locking his arms around Dean’s slick waist in front of him.

“Please,” he tells Dean, without the slightest idea what he wants, and Dean kisses his forehead and keeps guiding Sam’s hips along, up and down, until Sam spurts and shakes and drains himself clean.

Everything feels easier, now, with his muscles lax and the orgasm muddying his thoughts into something unguarded and warm and careless. “I’m sorry,” he slurs out, distantly soaking Dean in as his brother slathers shampoo in Sam’s hair, rinses it smooth, turns off the shower and carries him like a doll into their bedroom. “I love you,” he tries saying next, but his head feels heavy, and he’s asleep before he can tell whether the words reach Dean at all.

-

Dean wakes up ten minutes ahead of his alarm, and there’s a sick clench in his stomach even before he remembers about himself and Sammy. They’re sleeping pressed up together like usual, Sammy naked under the covers and Dean wearing just a thin pair of boxers, and he disentangles himself as fast as he can from his brother without jostling him too much, then sits up and swings his legs over the side of the mattress with his head gripped between his fingers.

It hadn’t even really registered to Dean as being a sex thing, at the time. Sam was bad last night—maybe not the worst Dean’s ever seen him, but then, it was the first time Dean’s ever seen him talk that way about himself, about the hooking, about _killing_ himself, and so he gave Sam what he said he needed, even after Sam started backpedaling, _god_. Dean had been so sure that saying no to Sam was what his brother needed, but he’d been _doing_ that and watching Sam get worse and worse, until he thought maybe, if it was just once, if nothing else was helping—

He’d promised himself he was never going to touch Sam like that, and now…

Dean lets the alarm blare at first, until Sammy stirs and fidgets next to him, and then he slams his hand down on it and groans. For a long moment, neither of them speaks. Then—

“Dean…”

“It’s fine. We’re good.”

“ _Dean_. I… I’m sorry. I’m gonna be good from now on. I’ll—try harder, get a grip on—”

“You don’t gotta apologize, Sammy. This ain’t your fault.”

“But—”

“I said we’re good. Go get dressed.”

He snatches up the first clothes his hand skims out of his duffel and marches straight into the upstairs bathroom before Sam has a chance to catch up. Locks the door behind him. Takes a dump, changes, shaves, and brushes his teeth, all the while staring at the mirror reflection of the shower curtain and picturing how out of his mind Sam looked in there last night, rutting on Dean like he couldn’t help himself even as he begged Dean not to hate him for it.

Dean swallows, blinks tears out of his eyes. No. _He_ fucked things up, allowed this to happen.

He drops Sam off early at Whittier as usual, but he bypasses Joe Foss entirely and instead drives aimlessly around downtown Sioux Falls for five, ten, thirty minutes, eventually pulling into the loose-gravel lot behind a bar with a little rainbow flag in one of its windows. The place doesn’t open until eleven, and Dean shoves his hands into his stupid leather jacket and takes a walk that turns into a run, panting for breath every time he hits a red light, feet to concrete till all his muscles are screaming, and then some.

It takes him nearly four hours to make his way back to the bar. Dean ducks into the bathroom to catch his breath, turning the lock and retching everything he’s got into the toilet until he feels like a person again. He feels sort of bad about it—all that effort building his appetite back up—but the empty feeling steadies him as he dips his lips into the tap to rinse out his mouth and splash water across his face.

He saunters out and up to the bar, gets himself a pop—he doesn’t really want to do this without lots and lots of whiskey, but what he _wants_ isn’t the point, and anyway, Dean needs to be able to drive back to Whittier to pick Sam up by half past three. He’s not sure how long he sits there poking at his Coke, but he’s drunk it all and gotten halfway through a second by the time the bartender slides a beer in front of him and tilts his head toward a booth behind them. Dean glances at the clock first—quarter past one; he’s been here longer than he’d realized—and then back at the indicated booth, finding there a skinny guy with dark olive skin and black hair who nods at Dean and smiles. Dean smiles back, a wobbly thing, and takes a little sip from the top of the beer. He can drink half, he tells himself, just half, and then they’ll—

“It’s a little early in the day for a strange guy like you to be in here,” says the dark-haired man, and Dean blinks and looks up to find him suddenly right there next to him, pulling out the barstool to Dean’s right.

“You calling me strange?” Dean prompts, gentle, sly—curls up one corner of his mouth.

“In this bar? If you’d been in here before, I’d have recognized you.”

He tilts his head to the side a little, smiles wider. “Calling me memorable, then?”

The dude grins, takes a swig of his own beer. He looks old enough to be legal, but not by much—maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. Far cry from the pretty girls Dean likes to go for, but he’s charming and genuine with an underlying thrum of nervous tension, and Dean thinks he’ll do fine. He tips his bottle back down to the counter, tells Dean, “I’m Aaron.”

“Dean.” It makes him feel uneasy, not to lie, but what he wants is anonymity, and this isn’t about wants.

Aaron cracks quick—twenty minutes, tops—after only a couple murmurs of _are you really sure?_ before he lets Dean take him by the hand and off of the barstools. He offers to bring Dean back to his apartment, but Dean hasn’t got the time or, to be honest, the guts to drag it out that long. Takes Aaron around the corner and back into the bathroom, locks the door. Dean is breathing hard, plays it off as arousal. Kisses Aaron’s mouth—bites it—and backs himself into the wall.

Aaron’s got both their pants down before Dean knows what’s happening, which suits him more than fine. Aaron starts to ask, little twinge in his voice, “How d’you wanna—?”

Dean shrugs out of his shirts and answers by turning to face the wall, knees apart, cheek against the scratchy grey concrete. He swore to himself he wouldn’t lay a hand on Sammy, and if he can take this from Sam, he can sure as hell let some skinny twig of a guy take it from himself. “Like this,” he says, same as what he told Sam, his Sammy who had trusted him.

He focuses on the yellowing porcelain of the sink next to them, on the cool metal curve of the door handle, and not on the way Aaron bites and sucks at the back of his neck. “I’ve got a condom—”

“No.”

Aaron pulls back, and for a second, his elevated breathing is Dean’s only sign that he’s not alone in the room. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah, just—get in me, come on—”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Let me just find—”

“ _No_ ,” says Dean again.

But Aaron insists on opening Dean up, and the least Dean can talk him down to are two fingers with spit. It hurts—even more so when his dick replaces the fingers, Aaron swearing like a bitch and thrusting, and the jolts Dean feels every time he rams up against his prostate just hurt worse. He grits his teeth, groans. This is what he gets, for wanting this from Sammy. _Ain’t this what you asked for? Weren’t you gonna do this to Sammy? Didn’t you_ know _this is how faggots like it?_

It ends prematurely when the skinny guy— _Aaron_ , he forcibly reminds himself, his name is _Aaron_ —tries giving him a reach-around and feels Dean’s limp dick for himself. “Hey, man, uh… you okay?” he says hesitantly, slowing his thrusts to a complete stop. “If you want to—”

“It’s fine. I’m good. Keep going.”

“Whoa, hey, not if you’re not into it. I could—”

“I don’t want—” Dean starts, but then Aaron pulls out completely, and he cuts off with a restrained gasp, wincing.

“It’s cool. It happens to everybody. I just…” Aaron turns him around, then, and frowns and reaches for Dean’s wet face.

Dean shudders and jerks himself free. “I should get going.”

He pulls on all his clothes and leaves to the tune of Aaron asking if everything’s really all right. Jogs out to the parking lot, revs up his Fifth Avenue, and just—drives.

-

By the time Sammy gets out of class, Dean’s butt hurts like hell. He shifts his weight around the whole drive back to Bobby’s and almost doesn’t notice, when he’s first pulling up the long drive into the lot, that their Impala is sitting right out front of the house, sleek and glinting under the faded March sunshine. “Dad’s back,” says Sam dully, and Dean grunts in response, struggling to hide his limp as he gets out of the car and heads up to the porch.

After he blew Sammy off this morning, the two of them barely talked today, and Dean finds himself wondering how long he’ll be able to keep the distance up now that Dad is back. In some ways, it’ll be easier: Sam hates the way that Dean looks up to Dad, won’t want anything to do with the things they do together, and Dean can play that up to get some time apart. But when Dad gets distant, or awkward, or bad off—and Dad always goes back to being bad off, sooner or later—it’s hard to respond to that any way other than sticking close to Sammy, if for no other reason than to protect him. Dean’s just going to have to adjust to _protecting Sammy_ looking a whole lot different than he’s used to, from now on.

He doesn’t know how long ago Dad got in, but the shouting has already started: Dean can hear it from the yard. He follows Sam into the house and finds Dad and Bobby going hard in the kitchen, Bobby’s gun hand on the pistol tucked into his jeans. Looks like Bobby broke open the safe with all their guns in it, Dean notes distantly.

“Dad?”

“ _Counselors_ , boys? Really?”

That same familiar mix of dread and relief floods Dean’s veins as he looks from Dad to Bobby and back again. He steps forward a little, repressing the urge to grab onto Sammy and yank him all the way behind Dean. He’s _known_ this must be coming, but he thought he had more time—

“Don’t you put this on them,” Bobby counters, ripping Dean out of his thoughts. “You ain’t _been_ here to see what it’s been like—”

“I called this house every day of the hunt,” says Dad furiously. “ _Every day_ I’ve been checking up, and _none_ of you bothered to tell me you’ve been running your mouths to—”

“Oh, for _four days_ your parenting was consistent. What do you want, a damn blue ribbon?” says Bobby, rolling his eyes.

“I want to be kept in the goddamn loop when Social Services come pestering my boys for information they can use against my family! You are _not_ their father—”

“ _Somebody’s_ gotta act like it—”

“And this was never your decision to make!”

“You’re right, John: it’s _theirs_. If opening up to a guidance counselor helps them cope with the shit _you_ put them through—”

“They _open up_ enough, and we could _both_ lose them, you ever think of that, Bob?”

“They’re not _stupid_. They know not to talk about hunting. We discussed—”

“It ain’t just the hunting,” says Dad, and then his eyebrows contort and he repeats in a mutter, “Ain’t just hunting. You fucking _know better_ , and this was _not_ your call to make.”

Beside Dean, Sam is starting to shake, and so Dean grips him by the shoulder and leans in to mumble, “C’mon, Sammy, let’s go on upstairs.” But before they can move two steps, Dad stops them.

“Pack up, boys. We’re leaving in five.”

And Dean should have _known_ , but he somehow still didn’t see this coming, even after thirteen years and change of town-hopping across the contiguous forty-eight, never staying put for long enough to put down roots or get to know anyone outside of the hunting life. He knows it’s over, and he suddenly wishes he hadn’t blown what could have been his last day at Joe Foss on some stupid hookup in a bar that he hadn’t even wanted, wishes he had more time with his teachers in the credit lab and even Ms. Everett, with _Bobby_.

He looks to the side to find Sam’s face pulling into an aghast frown. “But—”

“I don’t care if you’re perfectly content to stay here and get yourselves thrown into an orphanage—or, worse, a goddamn mental hospital—because nobody else around here thinks with their fuckin’ brain. _I_ am your father, and I ain’t havin’ it. _We’re going_.”

“ _No_!” Sam roars, actually stomping his feet in anger, his eyes starting to well up like they so easily do these days. “I’m not going! I’m not gonna stand by and _live_ like you—”

“ _Bags, now_ ,” snarls Dad, and he strides forward and cracks the palm of his hand across Sammy’s cheek. “ _Do not_ make me say it again. _Go_.”

Clutching his face and fuming, Sam rips his face away from Dad’s and breaks into a run all the way up to their room, Dean limping a short ways behind him. “Sammy,” he says, and then stops, because nothing Dean could say would be enough. Sammy whips his head around to look at him, eyes damp. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” scoffs Sam. “Go get the guns and check the bathroom. I’ll pack up here.”

As he speaks, Sam is fumbling around in his duffel and eventually pulls out his Walkman and headphones, jamming them on his ears as he starts up the tape inside. Dean immediately recognizes the tinny notes of the Counting Crows number from the mixtape Mounia gave him that Sammy fell in love with a million years ago in Nevada. He allows himself a few moments longer to watch his precious little brother fling open drawers and shove clothes indiscriminately between both their duffels, and then Dean forces himself to remember, to turn away, to flee the room and fetch his Colt and Sammy’s Taurus from Bobby’s unlocked safe.


	6. Chapter 6

Even in rush hour, traffic is clear across eastbound I-90 as John follows it along the southern border of Minnesota. They’ve been driving for over an hour now, the Impala prowling the asphalt and whizzing past dull stretches of brownish crops only just waking up from the winter. John’s crossed out of South Dakota and well into the state of Minnesota, and he swears the highway looks exactly the same here as it did when he got on it in Sioux Falls: two lanes each of faded grey gravel on either side of a grass median, as yellow and flat as is the surrounding farmland. He’s pounded down this turnpike and so many others like it more times than he could care to count in the past fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years, the time and the mileage all blurring together as useless as stagnant as John is himself.

It’s quiet except for the low purr of the car, John’s scratchy Sabbath tape humming in the cassette deck, and the faint but ever-irritating screech of Sammy’s Walkman from the backseat where he’s nodding along to whatever garbage it’s playing into his headphones. In contrast to the twenty-minute screaming and crying fit Sam had pitched when they’d all first gotten into the car, the moody silence Sam has now adopted while he glares out the window with his legs stretched out sideways along the vinyl seat is unnerving. Dean’s attitude is no better: he’s squirming about on the bench next to John with what looks like a physics textbook open in his lap, but his arms are folded over his chest, and he hasn’t flipped to a new page since he opened the damn thing an hour ago. It surprises John to see him paying active attention to his academic studies, especially since he’s between schools and hasn’t exactly got an exam coming up to explain things. Admittedly, John knows how well Bobby said Dean had been doing in that alternative school—

He ignores the churning of his stomach, the prickling underneath his flesh. _Counseling_ , John reminds himself. If he’d let his boys stay under Bobby’s thumb and influence back in Sioux Falls for any longer, John would have found himself in prison, maybe an asylum, for the things he knows he’s done to his boys, _knows_ he can’t explain, not always to himself and certainly not to a social worker: surely his boys would wind up in the system somewhere _away_ from John where he wouldn’t have been able to raise them right, or at least right enough to _warn_ them, protect them from what’s coming for them—for Sammy. They’re just kids, nowhere near mature enough not to allow themselves to let things slip to the likes of Social Services—hardly even old enough to come along on simple hunts. John wouldn’t involve them at all in anything more than research if he could guarantee they’d be safe in their inexperience, but he’s got no way of telling how soon the demon will come back for Sam, not enough ( _never_ enough) time for anything other than more sacrifices.

When he comes up on the exit at Highway 59, he asks if the boys want to stop and get some dinner. Neither answers or even moves to acknowledge that they’ve heard him. John keeps on driving, doesn’t ask again.

 _Fuck_ Bobby Singer, really. The indignation feels good, and John lets it bubble up in his chest and fingers. Tracking John all the way off his property, waving around a goddamn shotgun, carrying on telling him to _go on, then, run away to fuck up our boys like you always do, but if you do, you ain’t gonna be welcome in my house when trouble catches up to you_ —“our” boys, as if he’s got any goddamn claim over John’s children, as if he were more than a glorified babysitter who needs to learn his place.

They pass another hour before they come up on Blue Earth, catching John off guard as if he hadn’t taken this route to get there a thousand times over before. He sets his brow and keeps on the interstate, scoffing at the very idea of stopping in on Jim Murphy: John’s had quite enough of dealing with _other hunters_ for the month.

It’s not until he’s cleared Blue Earth, decided _not_ to stop _there_ , before John really considers that he doesn’t have an intended destination. He stays on I-90 for another ten minutes, then twenty. From the rearview mirror, he watches Sammy doze off to sleep with his neck strained and twisted against the fogging glass of the window behind him, then promptly start whimpering in the throes of an apparent nightmare. John tightens his jaw and ignores it. Dean throws his head back over his shoulder to glance back at Sam a time or two, but otherwise ignores it. It’s because of this more than anything that John hangs right on the turnoff that connects to I-35: there’s a good truck stop in Clear Lake, Iowa, half an hour down, where he can at least get his kids some real food and beds to sleep in, even if John can’t stop the dreams from coming.

He follows exit 194 to US-18 West, immediately turning on 24th, forking right, and following 25th Street past the Arby’s and two diners along to three chain motels tucked up together after the familiar tight curve in the road. He pulls into the lot of what he remembers to be the cheapest one—still not quite cheap enough for John’s tastes, but there’ll be continental breakfast for the boys, smoke-free rooms with clean towels and sheets. “Get your brother up,” John says as he puts the car in park outside the long, flat wall of windowed two-story rooms—it’s one of those motels with room doors accessible from the inside, a rarity in their line of work. “We’ll get dinner once we’re checked in.”

“I, uh, was actually gonna go out,” Dean says meekly from beside him. John frowns and looks over: Dean doesn’t look insolent, just… nervous.

He holds eye contact for a long moment, appraising, and then gives Dean a nod. “Don’t stay out all night,” he instructs automatically, and then John wrenches himself out of the car and strides across the lot up to the building.

The lobby indoors is all rich blues and burgundies, fake-suede upholstery on the armchairs across from the check-in desk. He crosses to the counter and gives the boy behind it a curt smile. “I’ll take a room with two doubles,” he says, and when he goes for his wallet, his fingers hesitate over the thin stack of credit cards before going for his cash reserve instead. He doesn’t have a hunt lined up, John tells himself, doesn’t have anyplace to which he needs to get going in the foreseeable future, and he cuts his thoughts off at that.

When he gets back out to the car, Dean is gone, and Sammy is sitting up straight in the backseat pressing the rewind button on his infernal Walkman. “Good,” says John awkwardly, not really expecting a response, and he opens the back door and waits till Sam gets the idea and hops out.

It’s tempting to just grab a pile of grub from the Arby’s or Wendy’s or McDonald’s all lining the truck stop, but John walks Sam instead back down to the diners, choosing the Perkins at random. His younger son is still pissed about leaving Sioux Falls: that much is clear from the long and uncomfortable silences that stretch between their interactions with their waitress, from Sammy’s downcast looks and the gloomy way he stabs at his turkey and vegetable dinner. John doesn’t know what to say, besides to ask him about school and his routines at Bobby’s from the past week while John was gone hunting, and John doesn’t need to be much of a people person to know that bringing up Sioux Falls would just be asking for a fight that he doesn’t have the patience or energy to see through.

Dean’s still gone and Sammy passes out in one bed in five minutes flat when he and John get back to the motel. He should be tired—drove directly to Sioux Falls after wrapping up the hunt in the middle of last night, and from the disaster at Bobby’s, he came straight here—but he won’t be sleeping anytime soon with the adrenaline still coursing through him, he knows. Scrubbing his face, telling himself to get his shit together, he calls down to the front desk to arrange for a cot beginning tomorrow, then dillydallies about counting his cash and calculating, thinking it through, thinking about all the things he swore he wouldn’t.

When he feels it coming on, he ducks into the bathroom and stuffs his face in a stiff white towel to muffle the sound of it: it wouldn’t do for Sam to wake up, or Dean to come home, and his boys to see him like this. He pictures Mary—wonders, not _if_ , but _how much_ she would be ashamed.

-

Dean has finally returned to the motel by the time John wakes up the following morning. His elder son is snoring beside him in John’s own bed, not the one Sam claimed last night, and it catches John off guard, unsettling him for reasons he can’t rationalize. At eighteen, of course Dean is old enough that he should sleep on his own—it’s why John is having the motel staff bring along a cot in a few hours—but without one in the room just yet, it’s really no more or less appropriate for Dean to share with Sammy than with John. He must just be in the habit of seeing his boys share because they had for the past month at Bobby’s, John tells himself firmly. Dean must be tired of the lack of privacy from his brother, and never mind what John saw in Sioux Falls that might suggest otherwise.

It’s barely six o’clock—too early for the Fareway just down Highway 18 to be open—but if memory serves him, the Casey’s General Store right around the corner from the motel is open around the clock. God bless truck stops and their accommodations. The path back to 24th Street and then onto Plaza Drive would hardly take five minutes to walk, but John drives it anyway: the car could use a fill-up, and Casey’s has good prices.

He pays cash again for the gas, as well as for a stack of one each of every newspaper they’ve got, which he cracks open over an Egg McMuffin and a coffee at the McDonald’s next door. It isn’t until he’s halfway through the _Globe Gazette_ sitting atop the _Mirror Reporter_ and the _Register_ , one hand idly fingering his sandwich, that John realizes what he’s looking for, and when he does, he almost spits out a mouthful of coffee.

He’s got the papers already, he reasons; if he catches wind from them of anything amiss in Cerro Gordo County, or south of it in the populous Des Moines area, he’ll investigate. But nothing looks out of order, not even after two cover-to-cover readings of all three rags, and John takes a hard breath in as he downs the last of his now-cold coffee.

He’s not going to go looking for a case outside of the area. Time with his boys follows time away: it’s the closest thing to a functional system John’s got, and he knows better than to abandon it now. His savings won’t last them more than a couple of weeks here, but he’s going to need to get the boys back into school—and, Christ, formally pull them out of the district in Sioux Falls, too—and John’s got no real reason to move on and enroll them somewhere other than Clear Lake.

Satisfied, he clears away his trash and the papers, then backtracks to the register to order breakfast to go for the boys. Back in the motel room, however, Dean is already gone again when John returns, finding Sammy alone there with those ridiculous headphones back on his ears and his face jammed in a tattered paperback.

“Where’s your brother?” John asks as he tosses the bag of fast food to Sam, who blinks up at John when it lands on the mattress half a foot away from him.

“I don’t know, sir. Out.”

John _harrumphs_ in the back of his throat and leans against the wall, watching Sam peel open the bag and turn up his nose in distaste. How is it that it’s only ten o’clock in the morning? How can civilians stand to fill all the droll, endless hours of their tiny little lives?

“I’ll call on Monday to set you both up in school,” he says stiffly. “I don’t want you boys out of class for too long.”

Nodding, Sam bites into his breakfast sandwich and licks up the grease from his fingers, _knowing_ how much the habit revolts John. When he swallows, he doesn’t move to speak and instead dives back in for another bite.

“Fareway should be open by now. I’m going to stock up the minifridge, then swing by the library to get the numbers for the schools.”

“Yes, sir,” Sammy says dully, still looking down at his food.

“You should get out—walk down to the lake. It’s supposed to be nice.” ( _Really_ , John?)

Sam just shrugs and starts in on the sandwich that John had intended for Dean, had he still been here. Tossing down the second room key for Sam to use as he likes, John doesn’t say goodbye when he falls back and leaves the room.

As far as he can tell, Sam doesn’t get down to the lake, but John himself does—drives along it, anyway, while he’s canvassing Clear Lake. The town wraps around the east side of the large lake from which it derives its name; most of its eight thousand residents seem to be concentrated within the northwest quadrant of the town inside a tight grid of quaint little American Foursquare homes. Old-fashioned brick storefronts, a grassy city park and playground, and a steel water tower stamped with the name “Clear Lake” in sans serif uppercase comprise the historic downtown, which borders the still lake that extends west further than the eye can see. Beneath the cold March sunlight filtered through a thick layer of stratus clouds, the water is a dull, dark blue; the houses lining the lakefront are bigger and, John imagines, must cost a relative fortune.

He eventually pulls off the road and parks in the lot for the Surf Ballroom, fishing the _Clear Lake Mirror Reporter_ out from the stack of newspapers next to him on the bench. Flipping back to the classifieds, he skims for rental properties and job postings with gritted teeth and a grimace.

Mind made up, he gives a put-upon sigh and flips open his cell phone. Caleb picks up on the second ring. “Gonna need some ID and records forged,” John tells him. “I’m in Clear Lake, Iowa, maybe five hours out. You happen to be free this weekend?”

-

When Dad says he’s leaving to meet up with Caleb for a few days, it takes everything Sam has to keep quiet and hold himself together. He reminds himself that this isn’t the same as Nevada: Dad’s leaving to take care of tax paperwork or something, not to go hunting; he’s paid down the room and brought in plenty of groceries, and besides, Sam knows that Dean was hoarding cash the whole time they were staying at Bobby’s. Still, his gut clenches and throat tenses in a way that won’t release even after he’s got blood trickling down his thigh and his mixtape from Nevada screaming in his ears.

It’s not that Sam _likes_ the reminder of everything that happened in Henderson, but he’s attempted to shut it out, without success, and feels exhausted by the thought of continuing to try. At least dwelling on it, awful as it was, allows Sam to—validate what happened, in a weird way. Like, yeah, he’s a whore and a fuckup, but at least he can sit in that and admit it to himself.

Dean doesn’t come home all day, not even when it’s midnight and Sam’s piling blankets onto his bed to sleep. The desk clerk brought a cot up a few hours ago, but they won’t really need it until Dad gets back from Caleb’s, and by then, _Dean_ can get stuck with the cot if he wants his space that much. It was kind of a relief last night when Dean shared with Dad instead of Sam, but at the same time, the lack of trust Dean demonstrated in doing so still stings.

It’s because of Dean’s recent pointed avoidance of him that Sam is startled when he wakes the following morning to Dean throwing pillows at his head. “What,” he says without any real feeling behind it. He cracks his neck, stretches, scratches the patch of scabs on his thigh.

“We’re going out. You need to get up if you don’t want to miss our bus.” Dean’s voice sounds cold and far away as a narrow slip of paper joins Dean’s pillows on Sam’s bed.

He picks up the slip and squints to make out what it says in the dim lamplight. Outside, the sky is still nearly pitch-black. “Nebraska?”

“Yeah,” says Dean unhelpfully.

“Why are we going to Nebraska when our motel is paid off here? Why didn’t Dad take us with him when he left for Lincoln yesterday? What—”

“Because we’re not _going_ with Dad to Lincoln. We’re going to Omaha, and only for the day. I got us tickets back for tonight.”

Sam flings his bus ticket aside and looks curiously up at his brother, who’s already fully dressed and glancing skittishly around the room. Dean’s face is all cut up and looks discolored even in the crappy lighting, and he keeps gingerly shifting his weight from one leg to the other and back again. “What’s in Omaha?” Sam says carefully.

“Well, I, uh,” says Dean, and then he clears his throat and walks back from where he’s standing above Sam’s bedside to sit with a wince on the edge of the other queen. “I was just thinking that, um—I mean, I just—I haven’t gotten tested in a while, and I thought, uh, I should probably take you this time so you can get checked out, too.”

“Get tested for—?” Sam starts to ask, and then he puts it together. “Oh.” He can feel himself blushing all over, bile churning in his stomach. “ _Oh_ ,” he repeats, this time under his breath.

“Hey, don’t…” Dean takes a shaky-sounding breath but still doesn’t look over at Sam. A few moments later, he goes on, “I’m your brother, and it’s my responsibility to teach you good habits. I’ll be with you the whole time, okay? I mean—if you want me to be. If you’d rather go in alone and have some privacy—”

“I want you to stay,” Sam says hastily, flushing darker.

It takes Dean a little time to regain his train of thought. “Right. Okay. So that’s settled. Anyway, I was looking into it, and from where we’re at, Nebraska is the closest state with the best laws for, you know, protecting your rights and all that kind of stuff as a minor. And Dad’s already gonna be gone for a couple days, and we’re not in school here yet, so…”

So nobody, not even Dad, has to know. Sam appreciates his reasoning, even if he doesn’t want to go. It’s not just that he’s dreading the thing itself, either, although that certainly is also true. Sam doesn’t know how he’s going to stand spending six-odd hours on a bus each direction with his brother today when Dean’s so disgusted with Sam that he can’t stand to even look at him.

Dean’s obvious revulsion only makes it all the more humiliating how badly Sam lost control of himself in Sioux Falls. It’s taking all his energy every day to clamp down on the mess inside him, point it inward instead of at Dean the way he had been—but Sam never should have let himself get comfortable revealing the dirtiest parts of himself in the light of the external world, beyond his mind, not even to Dean. Jeez, Sam had gotten so _good_ at pushing down his wrongness last year, at restraining his racing thoughts and furious fantasies of _telling_ his brother, so that they didn’t exist outside of Sam’s mind. And he would have succeeded if it hadn’t been for Dean coming home early and catching him with those pills—fighting so hard to take care of Sam in Nevada even knowing what sickness taints Sam’s mind—until the sickness magnified a dozen times over and Sam believed it was safe to show it to Dean, that Dean alone would understand.

It wasn’t that Dean was unsafe to be told. It was that Sam was unsafe to do the telling, overestimated his own ability to lean on Dean for acceptable damages without foisting upon him the harms that Sam alone is supposed to carry, in the crevices of his mind where they’re not really real and can’t hurt anybody else, least of all his brother.

Sam’s brain is buzzing the whole time it takes to throw on his clothes and walk the five minutes along the road and across Highway 18. He and Dean are the only ones standing at the bus stop in the lot for the Pilot Travel Center. Even the highway is basically deserted of cars at this early hour—though that’s probably not saying anything unusual for small-town Iowa—and Sam stares out at the asphalt while his Walkman thuds along in his ears.

Dean’s still limping the way he has been ever since they left Sioux Falls. Sam side-eyes from Dean’s knees up to his chest, wonders how many bruises he’s gone looking for, across how many fights, to make him walk like this. He doesn’t say anything, though, not even when they’ve boarded the bus and Dean is noticeably fidgeting in his seat next to Sam’s, their thighs brushing together every time he does. Sam’s not allowed to seek that kind of intimacy from Dean anymore, and besides, he doesn’t want to open the door to questions if Dean’s noticed anything to do with the flesh wounds Sam keeps cutting into his leg.

The contact feels good through their jeans, and Sam presses into it as much as he dares—which admittedly isn’t much. He’s got the aisle seat, which means it’s up to Sam how to angle himself in his seat so that he’s touching as much or as little of Dean as he wants, and Sam still _wants_ , even if he knows now that he can’t take. He rests his elbow against Dean’s waist and tortures himself with how warm his core feels through the layers of cloth.

It’s not like Sam doesn’t realize how _weird_ it is—everything he wishes he could do to his brother, has already pushed upon him. He’s read books for school and seen specials on TV about parents who molest their kids, and he’s not too dumb to figure out that people would see Dean the same way if anybody ever knew that he’s kissed his little brother and brought him to orgasm. But Sam and Dean—it’s not sick like that if they’re not physically attracted to each other, right? Dean’s body _feels_ good, but Sam doesn’t exactly get turned on just—just looking at his brother’s abs, or something. No: it’s about how strong he is, how Dean earned his scars and built his calluses by protecting Sam and Dad, how he’s the _only_ person Sam can ever imagine feeling safe enough with to show _that kind_ of vulnerability to, especially now, after Sam—

—shudders, squeezing his eyes shut, searching for a distraction. Can he risk—?

He presses his knee just a little more firmly against Dean’s thigh. When he chances a sideways look, Dean doesn’t seem to be reacting, and Sam’s belly swells with a weird mix of excitement and disgust.

He isn’t supposed to be preying on Dean with his sick games anymore. It wouldn’t be wrong if Dean wanted the same things, but he _doesn’t_ , and Sam has already proven that he doesn’t have the self-control to maintain any kind of relationship with Dean without doing to him what— _worse_ than what Sam had done to himself, in a stranger’s SUV, in that alleyway in Henderson, back in Nevada—

The route to Omaha seems to stretch halfway to forever, with Dean not talking to him and the same mix looping a million times in his ears. Finally, at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere about three hours into the ride, Dean jostles Sam’s leg and makes to stand. “Any snacks for breakfast, Sammy?” he says in his stupid, high-pitched voice, and Sam says, “A fruit cup if they have one,” and for one shining moment lets himself pretend like the small talk is a sign that things between them are normal and Sam never fucked up, said anything, _did_ anything to betray Dean’s trust.

Either the mini-mart didn’t have fruit cups or Dean is just jerking him around, but Dean comes back out ten minutes later with donuts for himself and a bag of Veggie Straws for Sam. “Jackass,” he mutters as he rips open the top. Dean raises his eyebrows. “Jerk,” Sam amends.

 _Jackass_ , Dean mouths at him. Without thinking, Sam punches him in the arm.

Shit, he thinks, what part of _don’t touch Dean anymore_ is he too stupid to understand—but then Sam notices the wince Dean is fighting so hard to conceal. “Sorry,” he says quickly.

“You’re damn right you’re sorry,” Dean wisecracks with a light returning punch to Sam’s shoulder as the bus starts slowly rolling back out onto the road.

Sam crosses his arms. “Stop acting like I’m too stupid to notice something’s going on. Dad might be blind to everything we do, but I’m not. How many fights have you gotten yourself into between here and Bobby’s house, huh?”

“I haven’t gotten—” Dean cuts off abruptly when Sam reaches up with three fingers to touch the dark smear of burst capillaries on one of Dean’s cheekbones. He’d thought it would be allowed, that he could make an exception, for _concerned_ touches, but at Dean’s reaction, Sam retracts his hand and angles himself in the seat so his knees are swung outward into the aisle and their legs are barely touching.

He jams his headphones back onto his ears, but he holds off on turning his Walkman back on when Dean starts talking again. “I knew better than to let you do anything. I knew better.” He pauses, then, and Sam frantically tries to turn on his music before he can hear any further humiliation. “Sammy, I’m—”

But Sam misses the rest of whatever it was Dean wanted to tell him as Alice in Chains springs to life in his ears.

They don’t talk the whole rest of the time it takes them to get to Omaha. When the bus finally pulls into their stop, Sam shuffles awkwardly down the aisle with Dean pressed up behind him, and then he lurches away from his brother as he deboards. They walk the streets briskly, Sam lingering a couple steps behind Dean, who every so often stops to squint at a MapQuest printout of directions to the clinic.

“Why aren’t we doing this in a small town?” Sam asks at one point, just to cut the tense air. “Wouldn’t that be more private?”

“Naw, you want big cities for this, and liberal, if possible,” Dean answers, his voice edging between polite and awkward. “Better protections and access and stuff.”

The clinic, when they finally reach it, is small but clean, narrow and two stories tall, made of old brick and new wood-paneled floors. Dean goes to talk to the lady at the intake desk while Sam dawdles around the half-full waiting room, running his hands over the veneer of armchair backs and the crinkling wrappers of free condoms. He wishes he’d have thought to pick some of these up back in Henderson, so that he wouldn’t be here now with Dean, waiting to find out if he’s contracted HIV or god knows what in his butt.

Eventually, a nurse pokes her head out from behind a polished door and says, “Dean?” Sam exchanges a look with Dean and then follows him back.

“My little brother,” says Dean when the nurse starts to ask. “He’s a little shy about coming in for his first time getting tested, so I told him we could sit in on each other’s, you know, as long as that’s all right.”

Everything goes uneventfully, at first. Sam tries to be discreet about looking away when Dean gets his dick out. Then Sam’s stomach sinks when the doctor says to Dean, “There are a few diseases for which we’ll need to take cultures directly from your mouth or anus if you think there’s a chance you may have been exposed there. Is this something for which you’d like to be tested?”

And Sam’s going _shit, shit, shit_ on a loop in his mind because he’s going to need _both_ of those and now Dean’s going to _know_ and Dean wasn’t _supposed_ to know. He could still kick Dean out when Sam’s turn comes, but Sam doesn’t want to _be_ here without Dean to hold his hand and talk him through it, humiliating as that is to admit. But revealing to Dean any details of that night in Henderson is tantamount to Sam’s whole card castle of repression and denial collapsing after all these weeks and labor he’s put into building it, and—

“Yeah, let’s go ahead and test the full set,” says Dean with a grin and a wink at Sam. “Start good habits early for my kiddo here, that’s what I always say.”

Dean literally _never_ says that. No, what Dean’s doing is giving Sam an out, so that when _he_ needs these same procedures, he can pass it off as practicing for if he ever needs them in the future. Sam doesn’t know whether to feel grateful for the save or sick that Dean might already suspect what Sam did, and it never once occurs to him that Dean may have had his own reasons for doing what he did.


	7. Chapter 7

Dean doesn’t know what kind of hoodoo Dad and Caleb got up to in Lincoln, but Dad’s found himself a job and a rental home within three weeks of driving back to Iowa. The house isn’t much—a trailer in a park along the east side of the lake, south of downtown—but it’s got two bedrooms, indoor plumbing, and a five-minute walk to the lake, so Dean’s not really complaining. The mobile park is right next to a boat rental company, and when he’s really in the mood to torment himself, Dean entertains fantasies of renting one to take Sammy out on the lake for an afternoon.

He and his brother still haven’t really _talked_ since Sioux Falls. Dean’s co-opted the little living room as his makeshift bedroom, while Sam gets all the privacy in the smaller bedroom and uses it to hole up in there doing god knows what for hours at a time. Dean tries not to concern himself with it. He’s already proven that he’s not of any real use to Sam when he gets like that.

Anyway, Dad’s finagled himself a job at an auto mechanic shop, and Dean finds himself feeling honestly jealous compared to what he’s been going through up at school. Dean still remembers sitting down in the guidance counseling office on his first day of school here with Dad and whatever her name was, Mrs. Kinsey or Mrs. Kelsey or something-or-other—how angry with himself he had been for the nervous leaps his stomach kept making, because why else could the counselor want a meeting with his _dad_ unless something was wrong—?

“Dean,” said Kinsey or maybe Kelsey, her eyes skating between Dean and Dad, “I’m afraid that your school record is missing too many credits for Clear Lake High to promote you to the twelfth grade. You’ll be starting with us as a junior.”

Dean blanched for a second, then said numbly, “No. No, that can’t be right, I made up almost all my missing coursework at my last school in Sioux Falls, how can you be telling me that those credits are still missing—?”

His eyes jumped to his dad, who was wearing a thinly veiled look of anger and disgust, and then Dean sank down an inch or two in his seat at the thought of what Dad would have to say to him when they left Kelsey’s office. She, for her part, was folding her fingers together and smiling in the vacantly sympathetic way that Dean associates with the way people used to smile at him when they learned he’d lost his mother. “We received your records from Joe Foss,” she said, “but I’m afraid that our system isn’t designed to accommodate credits earned in those sorts of alternative models. I’m sorry there isn’t more that we can do for you.”

 _There is_ , Dean remembers thinking at the time, _you just won’t do it_.

So now he’s a junior again, all the work he put in at Joe Foss thrown out the window. He half-listens in all his lectures and doesn’t try much harder to meet people or otherwise immerse himself in the world of Clear Lake. He’s picked up a little brunette girlfriend named Sophie and a little crew of losers to sit with at lunch, but Dean doesn’t really _know_ any of them, which is just as well: it’s not like he’s going to find another Mounia in every town he moves to.

Nights he spends taking the Impala twenty minutes east to Mason City, where he can skulk around in bars without as much of a risk of anybody from the school’s administration recognizing him. He drinks a lot, fights a little, but doesn’t do anything so stupid as to warrant another trip to Nebraska—he learned his lesson the last time. Dad taught Dean better than that.

He’s tossing back a beer like usual when a young blonde man approaches him at the counter. “Buy you a drink?” the guy offers in a scratchy, high-pitched voice.

Dean gives him a once-over, smirks. “Already got one.”

“I can do you one better than the cheap stuff. Besides, there’s got to be a reason how a pretty boy like you could come here every night for three weeks and never leave with a girl.”

“And you think that reason is—? I’ve gotta admit, that’s bold for small-town Iowa.”

“I’m a bold fellow.” The guy sits down at the stool on Dean’s left, swivels around in it. “Name’s Brendan.”

“Dean.” They shake hands, crushing each other’s fingers.

So he settles into a routine: Sophie and her crew during the days, Brendan nights. What’s expected and what he deserves. Dean hates to call it a routine, knows that Dad could move them out of Clear Lake any minute here, but with Dad shelling out for a trailer, Dean thinks it’s fair to expect them to spend at least a _little_ longer here.

Sammy’s birthday sneaks up on him as they spend more and more weeks in Clear Lake than Dean ever would have predicted. The day of, he tells Sophie he’s got plans, texts Brendan not to wait for him in the usual spot, and comes straight home from school to turn on the TV and wait for Sam on the couch that doubles as Dean’s bed. Sam usually doesn’t get home until he gets back from his little friend’s house after suppertime, so Dean settles in with ramen and a bag of Fritos and doesn’t sit around checking the time.

After about an hour of this, he figures it’s about time he get started and springs toward the kitchen, ripping open the box of cake mix he snuck in from the store the last time he went grocery shopping for the household. Dean’s no baker, and he winds up with frosting on his nose and the batter slightly runny when it’s supposed to be cooked through, but he calls it good enough and sets it out to cool right around the time Sam should be getting home.

As the sky gets darker, however, he finds himself starting to anxiously check his watch. It just figures that the one day he’s blocked out to break routine and spend time with Sammy…

Dad gets home around six and just says “oh” when Dean reminds him what day it is. He sets down his papers at the table and gets out his pen; Dean turns the TV back on and stares unseeingly at it, waiting, waiting. He’s been avoiding Sam for Sam’s own good; he thought it too cruel to abandon him on his birthday, but what’s the use in trying if Sammy’s not even going to show up?

Finally, at almost midnight, well after Dad’s wandered off to bed for the night and left Dean sitting up alone in the living room, the front door opens. “Where were you?” Dean says dully.

Sam frowns without looking at him. “Allegra and I went out after we finished our homework.”

“Right.”

His frown deepens as he walks into the kitchen and spots the cake. “I didn’t know.”

“I know it’s not as good as a high school diploma, but I still wanted to do something for you.”

“You could have called me.”

Dean shrugs. “I didn’t want to interrupt your plans.”

Sammy looks at him, finally, and he looks sad and tired and somehow older than the fourteen years he’s just turned. “Thanks, Dean,” he mumbles, and he turns around and locks himself in his bedroom without eating anything.

-

Sam turns his pencil around and around in his hand, only half tuned into the math lecture he’s supposed to be listening to. It’s getting harder and harder to focus on anything other than his own thoughts these days, like his counselor pointed out to Bobby back before he left Sioux Falls. Those days feel so close by, like Sam could reach out and touch them if he wanted, like there’s nothing separating him from curling up under those covers in his bed with Dean—but of course, there are a hundred things making that an impossibility. He just has to keep telling himself that until it sticks.

When Sam resolved to get his act together and stay away from Dean, he meant it, but he didn’t really think it would last. This new reality where Dean’s not his best friend anymore—he doesn’t know how much more of it he can stand. He just keeps telling himself over and over that it doesn’t matter if it hurts; it doesn’t matter if he’s lonely and angry at Dean for seeming unaffected; he doesn’t have a choice but to keep staying away, taking it day by day.

And Sam makes little bargains with himself, tells himself he’ll never touch his brother again if it means he can have his best friend back, but he knows he couldn’t stick to that even if he wanted it, could he? Sam is weak and selfish and takes more than he deserves, and it only stops if he lets go of Dean completely. He just wishes Dean weren’t so _fine_ , staying out at all hours and parading around his girlfriend like the last six months meant nothing to him.

The thing (well, one of the things) Sam keeps coming back to is his memory of Dean’s eighteenth birthday, when they went hiking and Sam made an idiot of himself doing karaoke at dinner. He knows that that day was the precipice of something terrible—he remembers how scared and desperate for money the were, the fights about food, and of course what Sam ultimately did trying to _get_ food—but that electric feeling had felt so _good_ , sitting in the Nevada mountainside with Dean, missing the sunset because they couldn’t look away from each other. And he can’t stop telling himself, he didn’t _know_ at the time that this was as good as it got, that everything would be downhill from here. He had his perfect day with Dean, when it felt like maybe someday soon they’d give in to the unspoken thing between them and it would be good—and then he screwed it up so totally that Dean will barely even look at him and Sam doesn’t believe anymore that there ever _was_ an unspoken thing, that Dean ever felt about him what he feels about Dean. He wishes he could go back and—he doesn’t know—savor it more than he had, so that he could remember it more clearly today. He wishes for a lot of things he knows are impossible.

“Earth to Sam,” comes a cool female voice from behind him.

Sam snaps his head up to find that the bell must have rung: the classroom is emptying out around him, and the only friend that he’s managed to make here has started poking him in the back with her pencil eraser.

“Hey, Allegra,” he says quietly.

“You promised you were going to pay better attention today so I wouldn’t have to explain everything to you later.”

He rolls his eyes while she can’t see it and then swivels in his seat to face her. “Sorry. I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

“Dean stuff?” Allegra asks knowingly.

“Something like that.”

Confiding in Allegra about his family without revealing anything about hunting or being in love with his brother is a weird balance. It helps to let some of it out, but it also makes him feel guilty, like he’s lying by omission about the biggest pieces of the puzzle.

“Your place or mine?” she asks next.

“Please, god, yours,” says Sam.

Allegra lives near downtown in one of the American Foursquare houses that constitute most of Clear Lake’s residential sector. An American flag flaps out across the yellow façade and blue shutters of the house. Inside, there are two living rooms, a kitchen, an expansive dining room, a piano room, and, upstairs, more bedrooms than Sam will ever hope to have in his lifetime.

Upstairs in Allegra’s room, they get through math and history and are halfway done with their reading assignment for English when Sam’s mind wanders back to Dean again. It’s still hard to believe that his best friend is gone, even now that months have passed. They’ve had fights before, sure, but they would always make up within a week or two; there had never been this feeling of finality, like they _can’t_ work it out, they _can’t_ go back. And if Sam and Dean can’t go back—

“Sam, seriously, I know you’re in a fight with him and it sucks, but you’re never going to get into college if you can’t pay attention and get your homework done.”

“College?” says Sam, startled.

Allegra cocks her head to the side, squinting at him. “Yeah, I mean, I know we’re only in eighth grade, but what we’re going to be learning in high school builds on what we’re doing now, and you don’t want to fall behind before you even—”

“It’s not that,” he says, and Allegra frowns. “I just never considered before that I might go to college someday.”

She quirks an eyebrow. “Really? My parents have been breathing down my neck about it ever since I can remember. Granted, they want me to go to UNI so that I’ll be close, but…”

“My dad would probably have a conniption if I told him I was applying to colleges,” says Sam seriously. “He’d think it was a giant waste of time. Maybe before Mom died he would have felt differently, I don’t know, but not now.”

“How is college a waste of time?”

Sam doesn’t answer for a long moment, then finally says, “Waste of money, more like. Plus he doesn’t see the point in settling down.”

“No kidding,” says Allegra, and Sam gives a little sigh of relief. “How many cities have you lived in again?”

“I lost count a long time ago,” Sam says truthfully.

“Anyway,” she adds with a roll of her eyes, “I think you’d do great in college. You just need to stop acting like a dumbass and start paying better attention for once.”

Instead of thinking even more about Dean, it’s the idea of college that distracts Sam all throughout the rest of his homework and then dinner with the Solaires. Their house is just a three-minute walk from the public library, so he swings by there on his way home, grabs a computer, and runs a search for best colleges in the United States. But he doesn’t really know how to refine his search at all. What criteria do you even use to narrow down the infinite pool of results?

When he gets home, Dean is gone, and Dad is sitting at the little kitchen table poring over newspapers with a pen. Sam feels the familiar thrill of dread, wondering what Dad’s going to find in there that will move them away again—or, worse, take Dad away from him and Dean—but it’s muted, now, two months into living in Clear Lake with nothing happening so far. Dad looks up when he hears Sam bang the door shut. “Hi, Sam.”

“Hello, sir.”

“Where were you?”

“Allegra’s house.”

Dad grunts and turns back to his papers. Sam hovers awkwardly across the threshold for a moment, unsure whether he’s dismissed, but when Dad doesn’t seem to have anything more to say, Sam hoists his bag higher on his shoulder and scuttles off toward his bedroom.

He locks the door. He’s got a knife stashed in there, and he pulls it out of his duffel and turns it over in his hands a few times. Placing two fingers under the right side of his jawbone, he finds his carotid and lifts the knife to it—but no, that would be too easy, and he can’t put Dean through that again. With a sigh, Sam shimmies his jeans down his legs to reveal a mess of scabs and scars on his inner left thigh, just underneath the vee where his leg meets his pelvis. Gritting his teeth, he plunges the knife into the scarred flesh and draws a long line, taking care to balance himself so that the blood doesn’t spill from his skin onto the bed-sheets.

It’s not that he _likes_ to hurt himself, he muses as he’s mopping up the blood with a very dirty, bloodstained pair of underwear after he’s finished. It’s that he deserves it, for everything he did to Dean, for everything tainted and sick inside him that makes him love his brother too much, so much that it becomes all-consuming, the way no one he’s ever known has cared about a sibling before. Sam knows there are things horribly wrong with him: he just doesn’t know what to do to get better.

-

He goes back to the library the next day. Casting a furtive glance over his shoulder at the other building occupants, Sam squares his shoulder and types quickly, as though getting it over with fast makes it somehow better, “sibling incest legal states.”

Ten minutes later, he has them: Ohio, Rhode Island, New Jersey. He isn’t entirely sure what he wants to do with the information now that he has it—whether he wants to avoid these states or gravitate toward them—but he runs a few more searches and comes up with a second list: Ohio State, Oberlin, Brown, Rutgers, Princeton. Sam writes the names down on a sheet of paper in his science notebook, stuffs it back in his backpack, and then logs off quickly, as if erasing the evidence.

It’s not like it would really matter, anyway, living somewhere that being with Dean would be legal. Dean doesn’t even want him that way—Sam himself swore to give Dean up—and even if things were different, the legality of it probably wouldn’t matter to Dean: the Winchesters have always lived outside the law. Still, knowing that there’s somewhere in the U.S. where Sam could feasibly have a relationship with Dean without needing to hide or disguise it gives him a little blossom of hope that makes Sam feel a little more like himself amidst the mess of drama and obsession filling him up.

He’s aware that his thoughts and feelings are contradictory from one moment to the next. One of the most frustrating things about fighting with Dean is that he can’t decide whether he’s angry or lonely or depressed, whether Dean is a bastard or a saint, from minute to minute. But if it makes it easier for Sam to do what he needs to do to stay away from his brother, then he’s not above indulging in a little denial.

By now, he’s basically moved into Allegra’s house in the evenings. Sure, she’s been to his place, but it’s always a little embarrassing to show his current lodgings to friends from school: it’s not like _Allegra_ lives in a trailer, for god’s sake. Besides, there are a few hours every day between when Dean brings his little girlfriend home from school and when he takes off for wherever the hell he goes at night, once Dad comes back with the car, and Sam is keen to spend those hours as far away from Dean as possible.

Spending time at Allegra’s house has come to be Sam’s favorite part of his weekdays. It’s largely because of her tutoring that Sam is staying afloat in his classes, but beyond that, he loves going to Solaire family dinners and just watching the way they treat each other—treat him. They tease each other, but kindly; they say “please” and “thank you” and “bless you,” and they cover their mouths when they cough; Allegra calls her father “Dad,” not “sir.” They make him feel like a small part of it, but he wants more. He wants more than anything to have been born into a family like Allegra’s, where you stay put for years at a time, where there’s always enough to eat, where there are two living rooms instead of one that’s been repurposed as a bedroom—where you tease and bicker and make up with your sibling instead of falling in love with them.

The thing that gets to Sam most of all is that he could have had this life, in Lawrence, if not for the thing that killed Mom—if not for Dad running off to kill monsters on an unending quest to avenge Mom that kicked his family into poverty. Well, Sam is better than his upbringing. Dean may be content to follow in Dad’s footsteps and never live a civilized life, but Sam is going to get a career and rise up out of what Dad subjected him to his whole life, because Sam is _better than_ Dad.

Anyway, he wonders what’s going to happen when summer vacation arrives in a few weeks. Allegra has other friends at school, but none close enough to bring home with her, judging by her willingness to hang out with exclusively Sam every evening. He hopes he’ll still be welcome in her house every day, or at least a few days a week.

Weekends are the worst because Sam hasn’t figured out how to ask Allegra to spend them with him, so he’s usually stuck at home, not knowing what to expect from Dad’s and Dean’s schedules, or else hiding out avoiding them at the lake with his books and his homework, trying not to let his mind wander too much, which is a lot harder to do without Allegra helping distract him. Then there are the days that Dad designates as family days, when Sam, Dean, and Dad spend increasingly awkward hours together doing whatever Dad decides ahead of time. Dean always spends the time acting like things between him and Sam are totally normal, if distant, and getting so close to what he can’t have always makes Sam want to scream.

So he’s totally shocked one day to come home and find Dean in Sam’s room, spread-eagled on Sam’s bed. This is weird on multiple counts: besides the act itself, Dean is _never_ home at eight o’clock on a weekday. But here Dean is, facedown on the mattress with his arms stretched up to clutch the pillow that he appears to be inhaling, feet tangled in the sheets.

“Um,” says Sam to announce his presence as he closes his bedroom door with a snap.

Dean’s whole body shudders as he jerks into a sitting position, still clutching Sam’s pillow to his stomach and breathing heavily. “Sorry. I was just…”

What Dean was, it seems that Sam will never know, because instead of finishing his sentence, Dean sets aside the pillow and reaches under the bed to pull out—shit—the blood-soaked pair of underwear Sam uses to clean up his cuts. Neither speaks for a long moment, Sam staring at the cloth and Dean watching Sam. Finally, Dean says softly, “What is this?”

Something in Sam’s brain clicks into place. “You found those snooping around in my room.”

“You haven’t been on a hunt in months. Why would you keep something like this?”

“Why were you snooping around my room?”

“Unless it’s from something more recent,” Dean continues, speaking very slowly. “What have you been doing in here that would make you bleed like this?”

“How would you know how recent it is?”

“Why do you keep it hidden, by itself, under your bed?”

He feels like all the blood has left his brain, like he can’t breathe. “Get the hell out of my room.”

“Answer me or I’ll get Dad,” says Dean plainly.

Sam’s whole body runs cold. “You wouldn’t.”

“I would. I should have told him about Michigan, and I’m not making the same mistake again if this doesn’t stop today.”

“What are you going to do, huh? Are you going to make me strip for you ever day to prove I’m clean?” Sam spits.

Dean looks like he’s been slapped. “Sammy, I’m _worried_ about you.”

“Oh, you’re _worried_? That’s what you were when you were running around with Sophie giving two shits about me?”

It’s like every resentful thought Sam has had for the past three months is right on the tip of his tongue, even as it horrifies him to hear them starting to pour out. His head is spinning. Distantly, he hears Dean say, “That was—I’ve been trying to _protect_ you. I’m not good for you, Sammy. We can’t just go back to—”

“Why can’t we? I’ll be good, I won’t try and touch you, you won’t have to be disgusted with me—”

“You think you disgust me?” says Dean, looking surprised. “That’s not— _I’m_ the guilty one.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” says Sam.

Dean gives him a look so sad and scared that he suddenly looks years younger. “I don’t know how things got so fucked up,” he whispers. “I mean, I remember again when I retrace everything that happened, but…”

Half-smiling, Sam hesitantly walks closer and sits on the edge of the bed next to Dean. “I know. I don’t like to think about it, either.”

“You were so messed up, Sam. You understand that we can’t go back to that, right?”

Sam tenses. “I’m messed up now.”

Dean sighs. “We’ll figure something out, but the answer you’re looking for isn’t me. I _have_ to stay away from you.”

All the blood seems to rush back into Sam’s body at once, leaving him hot and faint. It feels like the two minutes he abruptly had his brother back are just as abruptly over. “You’d better go, then.”

Dean pauses. “First, promise me that you won’t hurt yourself anymore.”

“I promise,” Sam lies smoothly.

With a nod, Dean claps Sam awkwardly on the back, then stands and makes for the door. Giving Sam one last look, he turns the handle and disappears from sight.

-

Two more pairs of Sam’s underwear turn up increasingly bloody under the bed between their conversation and the end of the school year. Dean knows what he said, but he just can’t bring himself to tell Dad: he may be in over his head, but Dad is even less equipped to handle Sammy than Dean is, and Dean doubts that Dad’s reaction would be a sympathetic one.

He had hoped that by bringing Sophie around the house he could keep an eye on Sam without getting too close to him. Now that he knows Sam felt Dean was rubbing his nose in it, Dean’s not sure what to do. He doesn’t want to make Sam’s life harder, but he doesn’t feel good about leaving Sam all alone on weekends and the forthcoming summer days.

Perhaps conveniently, Sophie resolves part of the problem for him by breaking up with him right before finals week. “Come on, Dean,” she says with a sigh. “We don’t have real conversations. We’ve been dating three months, and I don’t know anything about you, and I feel like you’re just using me for—something, I don’t even know what. Not sex, because you refuse to have any.”

Dean takes it in stride without telling her that the reason he’s abstained has been because he feels too guilty about screwing two people at once who both think their relationship with him is monogamous. Of course, he can hardly call what he and Brendan are doing a relationship, for the same reasons Sophie cited when she dumped him.

He finds himself moping around the house with nothing to do for long stretches of time, alone, since Sam and Dad both never seem to be home. He even tries studying for finals, bored as he is, but it’s probably a lost cause after three months of not paying attention in his classes. In any case, he’s pretty sure he’s already pulling C’s and D’s in most of them, more from a lack of effort than necessarily a lack of understanding.

Dean allows himself increasingly frequent jaunts into Sammy’s room, in which he frets over the bloody state of Sam’s knife and underwear and breathes deep for Sam’s scent in the pillow. He knows it’s weird, knows it’s invasive, but can’t bring himself to care. He’s done this much to protect Sammy from himself, and what Sam doesn’t know can’t hurt him.

He gets so desperate that he actually considers calling Sonny for help, but he doesn’t know how to explain why he can’t get too involved without admitting that he and Sam had been sexually involved, and Dean is sure that the social worker in Sonny wouldn’t turn a blind eye to that. Bobby isn’t an option, either: even if not for him throwing them all out of his house this past March, Dean doesn’t want to know how Bobby would look at Dean if he knew what he had allowed to happen to Sam. Pastor Jim would probably try to be sympathetic but then turn around and report everything to Dad after they hung up. Given the way that Dean never keeps in touch with his friends—or makes many real friends at all, for that matter—that really only leaves one person who might not yet be too angry with him to listen, and Dean needs that so much right now that he’s willing to try and see what happens.

He calls Mounia.

By the fourth ring, Dean is sure she isn’t going to answer, but then she does, and her voice is breathless and angry. “Dean Winchester, you had better have a good explanation for what the fuck you went, you complete fucking _asshole_ , disappearing one day and moving out of town and not answering _any_ of my calls—”

“Your stutter is gone,” Dean remarks, feeling slightly shell-shocked.

“I made a breakthrough in speech therapy, which you would have _known_ if you had stuck _around_ for me, dick-bag—”

“Okay—okay, I get it, I’m sorry! You have to understand, I’ve done this a hundred times, you barely get to know someone before you move on and it’s not worth it to keep in touch—”

“ _Gee, thanks_!”

“I didn’t mean it like—”

“Like I’m never going to hear from you again after this conversation?” says Mounia hotly.

Dean doesn’t know what to say because she’s right: odds are good that he’s never going to call her again after he’s gotten what he needs, and he’s starting to feel shittier and shittier for it. “Please don’t hang up. Please. I know I haven’t been fair to you, but I need you.”

She sighs, and it seems to go on forever. “Let’s hear it, then.”

“Sammy’s been hurting himself,” says Dean quickly—the easy part. “There’s a knife. There’s so much blood, I don’t even… and I don’t know how to help him. I feel like I can’t let myself get close to him because—because—” He prays to a god he doesn’t believe in that he’s not about to make a huge mistake. “Sammy got raped.”

“Oh my god,” says Mounia softly.

“In Henderson. That’s why we left. We went to a family friend’s house in Sioux Falls. And, well, I read that victims sometimes become hypersexual seeking out consensual sex, and Sammy’s been—he’s been—”

He pauses, but it doesn’t seem like Mounia is going to put the pieces together on her own. “Sammy,” Dean says finally, “has been acting interested in—in me.”

Pausing again, he hears Mounia suck in a breath but say nothing. “And the thing is,” he continues, feeling a little braver, “I think he had a kid crush on me before all this happened, but he’s only fourteen, and he’s so fucked up about sex stuff right now, I don’t want to get too close and fuck him up even worse.”

“It sounds to me,” says Mounia, “like you can still be a healthy support for him as long as you don’t allow anything to happen.”

Dean doesn’t answer.

“Dean, please tell me you _didn’t allow anything to happen_.”

“We didn’t have sex or anything! I couldn’t—I couldn’t. I didn’t really _do_ anything to him; I was just—there, and he wouldn’t stop…”

“Okay,” she says slowly, “so you’re saying someone raped your brother and then your brother raped you?”

“No,” says Dean firmly. “I could have stopped him. I was just afraid of what would happen if I did. Look, I shouldn’t have called, I’m sorry—”

“No, don’t be sorry, you were right to call someone about this. I can’t even imagine keeping that much bottled up.” Dean doesn’t reply, and she sighs again. “A couple things, okay? First of all, just because there was a—incident—doesn’t mean that you can’t have better boundaries going forward, so that Sammy can still lean on you. And besides that… I think you need to realize that you’re a victim, too, here, even if Sammy never did anything out of malice.”

He appreciates the thought, but the thing Mounia can’t understand is that Sammy didn’t just have some kid crush on him, whatever Dean told her about it: Dean reciprocated Sam’s feelings, probably even encouraged him in them. Sure, he didn’t want anything to happen the _way_ it happened, but he still wanted it—wants it—and that, Dean knows, is unforgivable.

“I’m going to call you tomorrow afternoon,” says Mounia near the end of the conversation. “I want you to answer, okay?”

“Okay,” says Dean, fully intending to break his promise, but he answers when she calls the next day, and the next day, and the next.

It’s nice to have a friend again, especially now that summer vacation is here and he’s sitting bored at home all the time. He asks around and manages to find a job at a restaurant where one of Sophie’s friends’ dad is the manager, and that becomes the way he spends his free time, waiting tables and talking on the phone. Sam is almost never home anymore, and Dean and Dad maneuver awkwardly around each other on the weekends, Dad always poring over his newspapers at the kitchen table.

One day, Dean’s cleaning up the remains of a peanut butter sandwich when Dad pulls out the chair next to his and inclines his head toward it. “Take a seat, son,” he says warmly.

Taken aback, Dean dries his hands on a washcloth and sits down beside his father, awaiting further instruction. “How do you like living in Clear Lake?” Dad asks.

“Fine, sir,” says Dean, now even more confused. “It’s a town like any other we’ve lived in.”

Dad sighs, and Dean has a sinking feeling that he’s somehow answered wrong, as usual. “Are you happy here? Have you made friends or—or found hobbies?”

“Well, I have my job at the restaurant. I think Sammy’s made good friends with one of his classmates.”

“Sammy’s adaptable; he can make new friends anywhere,” Dad muses, apparently more to himself than to Dean, who waits patiently in his seat. Finally, Dad adds, “That’s all. Dismissed.”

Report cards arrive in the mail the next day. Sammy did rather worse than usual, averaging more B’s than A’s, while Dean managed to eke out passing grades in all his classes. Dad just grunts moodily when he sees both papers, but Dean quietly pins Sam’s to the refrigerator that night when the rest of the house is in bed.

True to its name, Clear Lake is a beautiful, sparkling blue in the summertime. He knows Sam likes to hang out downtown on the water, so Dean takes to driving the Impala along the length of the lake, parking it a good distance away from downtown, and then taking long walks up and down the shoreline.

He calls Mounia, sometimes, when he’s on his walks, and he complains about his family while she fills him in on what’s been going on in Henderson. He’s expressing the usual anxieties about Sam one afternoon when she tells him, “You know, Dean, it’s okay to love him. Even if you think you need to stay away from him, that doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to love him. You’re doing all this _because_ you love him, aren’t you?”

But that’s the whole problem, Dean thinks glumly. He loves his brother entirely more than he should.


	8. Chapter 8

It’s nine o’clock at night on a Thursday, and John is _drunk_.

Clear Lake doesn’t have many bars to speak of—most of them double as restaurants and would just make John feel out of place if he went there to get smashed—so he’s at home, burping, surrounded by empty bottles of beer. The kids are out god knows where, and it’s just as well: it’s not like John’s done a good job keeping track of them since they got to Iowa, not like he’s kept up their training or done jack shit to keep them safe from what’s out there waiting for them. It’s not like they’ll be losing anything by his leaving: all the more reason why they don’t need him to stay for them.

Today’s _Des Moines Register_ is sitting open on the table to where John’s circled a tiny headline about two women dying in a mysterious boating accident in Polk City. It’s probably an open-and-shut case, he tells himself, probably a straightforward haunting, nothing a quick salt-and-burn can’t fix. He’s overdue to take up a hunt, anyway; he usually starts hunting in earnest as soon as the boys’ school year is over—at their ages, usually takes them with him all summer for the experience. It’s already July, and he’s stayed stagnant in Clear Lake for the three weeks his boys have been out of school, and they’ve stayed with him. _Why_ …

He’s a _coward_ , thinks John, and he slams down a beer bottle so hard onto the table that he nearly breaks it. He’s _afraid_ of his own kids—of spending time with them—because he doesn’t know how to break through to them, and as a result he’s been hiding out in Clear Lake, telling himself it’s to give them some stability, when what they really need isn’t a dose of small-town living, it’s the structure of training and hunting. Whether he likes it or not, Sam _will_ have to face off against the demon that got Mary, and what will save him when it comes for him isn’t having lived in the same town all through high school and played on the goddamn soccer team, it’s having trained and practiced and prepared for that moment, so he’ll be _ready_.

And the thing is, John ought to take Dean and Sammy with him to tackle this haunting, to give them the exposure—but he won’t, because the truth is that he’s drowning here in Clear Lake, and he needs to get out on his own for a week and do what he does best, _alone_ , to feel like a whole person again. He’s putting his own needs before his kids’, and he’s making himself _sick_ , and so here he is, completely wasted, putting off the moment he puts things in motion and tells Sam and Dean that he’s leaving them again like the fuckup he is.

He drinks until he can’t walk a line. He drinks until he can’t hold his head above the table. He drinks until he pukes, and that’s when he judges that he’s sufficiently drunk enough not to be in any condition to have the conversation that he’s dreading having with his kids until he’s slept it off and gotten himself through the worst of his impending hangover.

John wishes that the yellow-eyed demon never took his Mary away from him. No: he wishes that the thing never came for his Sammy in the first place, so that his family would be safe from harm, so that he wouldn’t have to keep putting his children in danger now in the hopes of preparing them to take care of themselves down the line.

-

“Dean, come and talk to me for a minute,” says Dad.

When Dean got home around one in the morning, he’d been startled to find Dad still awake, and when he realized he’d been drinking, it was a shock that Dad didn’t start hollering at him about his grades or slacking off training or whatever it was he was probably pissed about carrying around inside of him. In all honesty, Dean’s surprised that Dad is even cognizant to summon him by eleven o’clock in the morning. It’s not out of the ordinary for Dad to drink a little—a beer or two every night, maybe—but he doesn’t get trashed like last night often, and when he does, the results are usually ugly.

Dean’s been awake for a couple hours now, boring himself to death watching mindless TV in his makeshift bed in the living room, long enough to watch Dad make multiple trips to puke in the bathroom and nurse a glass of water in the kitchen. When Dad speaks, his voice sounds quite steady, though, and Dean obediently switches off the television and traipses into the kitchen to join Dad at the table.

For a long moment, Dad doesn’t say anything, looking at Dean with something inscrutable in his eyes. Then he says, “I’m going out on a hunt.”

Dean’s stomach sinks so fast that the swooping feeling seems like nausea to him. He should have fucking _known_ not to get comfortable. He should have—he should have—“How long?”

“Couple days, maybe a week tops. It’s right here in Iowa, so I won’t be far, and you and Sam can stay put here in the meantime. Where is Sam, anyway?”

“He left an hour ago to go to his friend’s house. I can call him—?”

“No need. I’m trusting you to take care of the both of you, Dean.” The _don’t fuck it up like last time_ is implied, and Dean gulps. “The kitchen should be fully stocked, but I’m leaving two hundred dollars cash and a card for you, just in case. I’ll be coming straight back after I wrap this one up, though, so it shouldn’t be necessary to dip much into any savings.”

“Yes, sir. Good luck, sir.”

As soon as Dad leaves, Dean collapses, laying his head and his arms flat against the table. A hunt. Dad’s going on a hunt. Of course he is.

Dean feels like an idiot for not seeing this coming. He knew it was going to happen eventually—it always does—but the longer they stayed in Clear Lake without Dad leaving, the more secure he felt that surely _that day_ wouldn’t be the day that Dad took off again. He found himself making plans, following patterns, developing habits of where to go and with whom—seeing Brendan every night—chatting with his coworkers at the restaurant—it all seems so foolishly short-sighted now that Dad’s gone, left them just like he did in Nevada, and if Dad does what he always does and turns one hunt into six—if Dean allows them to run out of money again—!

He considers _not calling_ Sam, affording Sammy a few more happy hours of ignorance until he comes home from Allegra’s house, but if it were Dean, he’d want the respect of being told as soon as it happened. Scrubbing his hands over his face, he reaches for his phone, finds Sam’s number on speed dial. Sam picks up on the second ring. “Hey.”

“Hey,” says Dean. “You should come home; I gotta talk to you.”

“Why, what’s up?”

“Just get here, all right?”

It takes Sam twenty long minutes to come home— _to the house_ , Dean thinks, not _home_ , he needs to stop thinking of Clear Lake as _home_ , the next thing they know Dad’s going to move them again and whatever home they made here will be gone. Dean’s pacing around the length of the tiny trailer when Sammy gets there, frowning and marching right up into Dean’s space. “What was so important you couldn’t tell me over the phone?” he says accusingly.

“Inside,” says Dean.

Sam follows him into the house and then crosses his arms, refusing to sit when Dean sits. “Well?”

“Dad’s gone,” Dean blurts. He watches as something in Sam’s face shuts down, and he stands up on instinct, walks up to Sammy and grabs one of his hands. “We’re gonna be okay this time, I promise. I _promise_ , Sammy, please—”

Sam wrenches his hand free, gives Dean one last betrayed look, and then disappears into his bedroom. Dean gives him thirty seconds of privacy before he gives into his instinct and barges into the room after him.

Sammy’s room is small, with barely any room for the bed, the dresser, and the duffel that he’s currently zipping up and jamming onto his shoulder along with his backpack. Dean blanches. “Come on, Sammy, don’t be like—”

“Don’t you dare,” says Sam, giving Dean his hardest glare. “Don’t you dare tell me what to feel.”

He pushes past Dean again; Dean can hear him rummaging for something out in the living room for a minute before the front door wrenches open and then slams shut again. Dean sinks down onto Sam’s mattress and buries his face in his hands. He’ll be back soon, he tells himself. He just needs to blow off steam, maybe will want to crash at Allegra’s for the night until he calms down. Of course he’s angry; he’s probably scared; Dean’s scared, too.

The day drags on endlessly, Dean staring blankly at the television screen, not picking up when Mounia calls him. He’s not in the mood to talk, not to anyone but Sam, and Sam’s not here.

He doesn’t start getting seriously worried until he opens his duffel and finds the stash of cash he’s been saving up ever since Sioux Falls missing. Sammy wouldn’t need to take any money if he was just planning to crash at a friend’s house for the night… but even as Dean’s head jumps to images of Sam drowning to his death in the middle of Clear Lake, he reminds himself, he wouldn’t need money to commit suicide, either. He’s probably fine. He’s probably fine…

He calls the cell phone Bobby gave Sam in Sioux Falls. No answer. He sends a short text message on his crappy flip phone: _R u okay?_ No answer. He gets out the telephone book that arrived in the mail last month, finds the Solaires’ number in the white pages, and calls it. It rings once… twice…

“Solaire residence, Mavis speaking.”

“Mrs. Solaire, yes, hi, this is Dean Winchester. I’m looking for my little brother, Sammy. Do you know if he’s planning on spending the night at your house?”

“Sam?” Mrs. Solaire sounds surprised. “I haven’t seen him since he came by for breakfast this morning. Allegra’s been here by herself all day.”

“Right. Thank you.”

“Dean, is everything all—?”

He flips shut his phone and then hurls it at the wall, cursing. Tugging his wallet out of his pocket, he cracks it open and skims ahead to the most recent picture of Sam that he’s got: it’s about a year old, but Sam’s changed little enough in that time that it’ll work.

It’s wishful thinking, maybe, that motivates Dean to start by making the long trek away from the lake, across Highway 18, and toward the chain of hotels that includes the one they stayed at when they first came to town. He shows Sammy’s picture to the receptionists on duty at all three hotels, but it’s no use: none of them say they’ve checked in anyone today by the name of Sam Winchester. Although Sam could have used any fake name under the stars to check in, no one recognizes the picture, either, and Dean’s back to square one.

He walks back across the highway toward downtown. His legs are burning by the time he makes it there, but he still pokes his head in all the shops lining Main Avenue before walking up and down the lakefront and nosing around City Park. Nothing. He calls Sam again, and this time the call goes straight to voicemail. That’s good, he tells himself, that means Sam’s still conscious and breathing to be able to deliberately turn off his phone, but it’s hard to take the thought to heart when it means that Sam is now fundamentally unreachable.

He calls the Solaires again, this time asks to speak to Allegra. When she picks up on the other end, her voice sounds cool and accusatory. “What do you want?”

“Did Sammy call you at all today after he left your house? Did he tell you where he—do you have _any_ idea where he might have gone?”

“No. Sorry.”

“Please. He’s not in any trouble with me; I’m worried about him.”

“I haven’t heard from Sam since he left in a panic because _you_ called him about some emergency this morning. That’s all I know.”

Dean swears as he hangs up the phone again. He walks back to the mobile park, just to be sure that Sam didn’t come back while Dean was out looking for him, but the trailer is as quiet and empty as ever, showing no signs that Sam popped in during the afternoon. “Fuck!” he yells, kicking the wall once, twice, three times.

He’s looked everywhere he can think to look in Clear Lake for Sam, and everywhere he’s gone he’s turned up empty. Cursing, he grabs his duffel and the money Dad left for the week. He’ll swing by the Pilot Travel Center to see if Sam got himself a ticket out of town, and if not, he’ll just have to pore over the parts of town that aren’t Sam’s usual hangouts. He’ll walk till his feet are raw if he has to. Sammy is _gone_ , and Dean’s not going to stop looking for him until he finds him or Sam turns up dead, one or the other.

He tries to talk himself down while he’s walking across town _again_ back to the truck stop with the Greyhound station. Sam wouldn’t have stolen Dean’s money if he were planning on killing himself. Then again, Sam doesn’t seem to be doing much of any planning here: running off on his own, he’s likely to run out of food _faster_ than he would have if he’d stuck here with Dean and with Dad’s credit card. Dean’s just afraid of what Sam’s going to do to himself when he has that little revelation. Will he come back to a trailer that’s empty while Dean searches the country for him? Or will he be more reckless taking matters into his own hands? Dean tries not to picture Sam selling his body for food—Sam plummeting to his death from a bridge somewhere—

He reaches the truck stop, finally, and finds the Greyhound window inside the Pilot Travel Center. “I’m looking for my little brother, Sam Winchester,” says Dean dully, not expecting much as he pulls free the picture of Sam and passes it to the desk attendant. “He ran away from home, and I’ve been awful worried about him. I thought he might have bought himself a ticket here to somewhere—?”

The guy behind the counter nods, running his thumb over the picture. “Yeah. Yeah, we got a kid in here this morning looked like this who wanted the first ticket out of here he could find. Sold him a ticket to the next outbound bus.”

Relief and dread crash over Dean in waves. “To where?” he asks.

The attendant pauses to look it up in his records. “Flagstaff, Arizona.”

Dean sets his jaw. “Get me a ticket on the next bus to Flagstaff you got.”

-

Sam has been living in Flagstaff for two weeks when he hears pounding on the door and Dean’s voice hollering at him to open up. Immediately, every good feeling he’s had for the past fortnight evaporates. He knew that this scheme of his wouldn’t last forever—either Dean or Dad would find him, or he’d run out of money and have to call Dean to come get him—but he still thought he had more _time_ , just like he’d thought he’d had more time in Clear Lake before Dad went running off chasing another hunt again.

It felt good to have some independence, to throw up a middle finger at his feelings of needing something from Dean that Dean just wouldn’t give him. Now, with Dean _here_ , in Flagstaff, it’s time to pay up, and Sam’s not sure whether it’ll prove to have been worth the two weeks of sanity.

He opens the door. Dean barges in, flinging his duffel from his shoulder onto the floor; he kicks the door shut and crowds Sam into the wall, running his hands over his sides, his hair, his face. “I thought you were dead when I couldn’t find you,” says Dean hollowly, and Sam feels a fleeting surge of guilt. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Sam chokes out. “Dean—”

But he never has to figure out what to say next, because Dean crouches down to Sam’s eye level, swears, and then leans in to—and, shit, he’s kissing Sam. _Kissing_ Sam. His insides re-inflate so rapidly that he feels lightheaded; he squirms just to feel the way he’s pressed up tight between the wall and Dean’s figure, taut with tension where he’s crouched down to Sam’s level, pushing him into the drywall.

Sam winds his arms around Dean’s neck and digs his fingers into Dean’s scalp, pulling on the short hairs there. Dean is kissing him with an intensity totally unlike the gentle kisses he gave him back in Michigan; he runs his hands up and down Sam’s chest, slips them under his shirt, and has been pushing at Sam’s chin for a solid minute before Sam figures out what he’s trying to do.

He tilts his head away to break the kiss, helps Dean wrest Sam’s shirts over his head, and lets out a surprised _eep_ when Dean actually picks him up and slams him into the wall. “Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean,” he gasps, half regretting it even as he’s saying it, “shouldn’t we be talking about this—?”

Dean stares at Sam for a long moment. “You’re alive,” he says simply.

“I know.”

“I’m not gonna have sex with you.”

“I know.”

But Dean still strips them both down to their underwear and kisses a blazing-hot line down Sam’s skin where his abdomen and thighs meet his briefs, taking extra care to nip and suck at the marred skin on Sam’s left thigh. It’s the middle of the afternoon, but they still fall asleep intertwined together half-naked on the floor; Sam can feel Dean’s breathing billowing up into his own stomach where their bodies are pressed together.

He can’t help feeling like he lucked out, getting away not only with no punishment but with Dean _making out_ with him, clothes coming off and everything. In retrospect, he’ll be glad he didn’t know that the good feeling wouldn’t last long—glad he got to savor it without the knowledge of what was to come fucking it all up.

-

John comes back to Clear Lake to find the boys gone and both their duffels missing. He growls low under his breath, then dials Dean’s number. He leaves for _two weeks_ and comes home to this—!

“Sir,” Dean says breathlessly when he answers the phone.

“ _Where_ have you been?”

“Sir, we’re in Flagstaff, Arizona. We’re coming right back. I’ll buy the bus tickets today—”

“Dean,” says John slowly and quietly, fighting to keep his temper in check, “what are you _doing_ in Flagstaff, Arizona?”

There’s a long pause, now, during which John can hear Dean’s breathing and nothing else. John sneers, “Don’t make me ask again, Dean.”

Hesitantly, Dean admits, “Sammy ran away, sir. I’ve been chasing after him for two weeks—I just found him yesterday—”

“Ran away? _Why_ did he run away?”

“He ran away when—when you left, sir.”

A hot, bubbling feeling rises up inside John that he shoves down as soon as he feels it. He doesn’t have time for shame, only discipline. “I expected better from you, Dean,” he snaps. “Stay put. I’ll pick you up. Tell me where to find you.”

Dean gives him the directions, and John scribbles them down, grunting. When he hangs up the phone, he allows himself a few desperate sobs before he pulls himself together and turns back around out of the house to hit the road.

It takes John nearly two whole days to make the drive from Clear Lake to Flagstaff. He blasts Metallica and doesn’t allow himself to think, the bubbling feeling in his chest rising and rising until he’s parking in the motel lot and charging up to Sam and Dean’s room door.

He knocks once, twice, three times. Through the thin motel wall, he hears scuffling for a long minute before someone pulls open the door. Dean. John looks into the face reflecting everything John hates about himself, like a mirror of all of John’s failures, and the hatred _surges_ in his chest and he—

—punches Dean _hard_ , sending him flying backward onto the dirty floor of the room. He yells, his own voice unrecognizable to him, “I trusted you to watch him!” He gets down onto the ground, punches again right in Dean’s bloody face, burst capillaries sending a rosy tint up into Dean’s cheekbones. “You lazy, insolent, good for _nothing_ —!”

“ _Dad_!” screams Sam’s voice from somewhere inside the room, but John doesn’t look up. “Dad, get _off_ of him!”

John does not get off of him. John towers over him, hunched with his knees on either side of Dean’s hips and his face bent low to Dean’s own, and he draws his arm back and puts the full weight of his body behind his arm, bringing it crashing down onto Dean’s abdomen this time. His boys have not had real training since John settled them down in Henderson last January; Dean is no match for him; he doesn’t even _try_ to fight John, the pathetic kiss-ass, just lies there limply looking betrayed, as if he has _any right_ to believe that John is better than this when John can’t even keep his own kids from running away from the messes he puts them in, first in Henderson and now in Clear Lake, even when he tried his damn hardest, did _everything_ for them, skipped out on training for them, stayed put for _months_ for them—

At first, he does not register Sammy pulling on his shoulder, trying to rip him off of Dean. He flexes and pins Sam to the ground, but he cannot bring himself to beat Sam, too, not when Sammy is just protecting Dean. If nothing else, at least he taught his children this one thing, to protect one another…

John draws slowly back from Sam and looks over his shoulder at Dean to survey the damage. His face is a bloody mess, and he’s cradling his stomach, but he’s at least moving, breathing. “Clean yourself up,” John snarls. “We hit the road in twenty.”

Dean opens his eyes and stares at John like he’s the monster that he is, and John smiles.


End file.
